Dior Meets A24 or The Megalomaniacal Ego of Jonathan Anderson. Satire by Eleonora de Gray, Editor-in-Chief of RUNWAY MAGAZINE. Photo / Video Courtesy: Dior.
Short Film is Written and directed by Aidan Zamiri.
Featuring
Sabrina Carpenter as Jonathan Anderson
Camille Cottin as Jonathan Anderson
Josh O’Connor as Jonathan Anderson
Drew Starkey as Jonathan Anderson
Sophie Wilde as Jonathan Anderson
With Jonathan Anderson as Jonathan Anderson
“This is the start of an exciting partnership built around artists and storytelling. Putting two creatively driven worlds side by side – you start to see what they pull out of each other that neither could’ve found alone. That’s where the interesting stuff happens.”
– Jonathan Anderson, Creative Director, Dior, talking about short film about himself
Introduction
Christian Dior has announced a two-year cultural partnership with independent entertainment studio A24 Films LLC. Founded in New York in 2012, A24 operates as a film and television production and distribution company behind Oscar-winning cultural touchstones like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Moonlight, Euphoria, Beef, Midsommar, and The Zone of Interest.
Rather than functioning like a traditional Hollywood lot, the studio has cultivated a devoted cult following by wrapping auteur-driven cinema in a high-fashion, boutique aesthetic—monetizing film fandom both at the box office and through limited-run direct consumer retail and recurring memberships.
Underneath the viral campaign, Dior has signed on as the premier partner and primary underwriter of New York’s historic Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, which A24 acquired and reopened. The two-year agreement encompasses three main pillars:
- Sponsorship & Programming: Dior will finance curated live theatrical runs, film screenings, and emerging artist programs at the venue.
- Wardrobe & Film Integration: A dedicated platform for Jonathan Anderson and Dior to design custom stage and screen wardrobes for select A24 projects.
- Educational Grants: Joint mentoring initiatives and practical opportunities for students in film and stage production.
Stripped of the indie glitter, what did Dior actually sign
A24 does not merely distribute movies; they monetize aesthetic tribalism. They sell clothbound shooting scripts like rare art volumes, peddle overpriced scented candles tied to horror films, and drop limited-edition gym shorts. With their AAA24 club, they charge their disciples a monthly fee for the grand privilege of early merch drops, collectible postcards, and theater tickets. They took the mechanics of Supreme, grafted them onto art-house cinema, and created a demographic that mistakes purchasing corporate studio swag for having an intellectual personality.
A24 recently purchased the historic Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village—an iconic off-Broadway playhouse with a hundred years of radical artistic legacy. Enter Dior as the “premier partner and underwriter” on a two-year cultural contract.
In plain terms: Dior will finance stage programming, live theater runs, emerging artist showcases, and student mentoring initiatives at Cherry Lane. In exchange, the house gets an official Manhattan sandbox where Jonathan Anderson can design theatrical costumes, drape himself in off-Broadway prestige, and attempt to buy the one thing: genuine downtown cultural cool.
Partnering with A24 gives Dior direct access to cinema’s most fiercely loyal demographic—young, art-house, anti-corporate aesthetes. By planting its flag inside Greenwich Village’s historic Cherry Lane Theatre, Dior buys a permanent Manhattan stage to legitimize itself as a patron of avant-garde culture rather than a luxury retail machine. It transforms runway marketing into theatrical credibility, offering the house an experimental laboratory where Anderson can dress live Off-Broadway productions and infiltrate indie film credits long before the clothes ever hit an Avenue Montaigne boutique.
Funding the arts is historically noble. But the way this patronage was unveiled to the public abandoned any pretense of art and went straight for clinical, commercial narcissism.
The Megalomaniacal Ego of Jonathan Anderson
There was no tribute to the historic boards of the Cherry Lane Theatre. Instead, Dior Instagram was flooded with promotional shorts directed by Aidan Zamiri that plays out like a fever dream of modern designer vanity.
The premise? A celebrity-stacked audition tape where Hollywood darlings—Sabrina Carpenter, Josh O’Connor, Camille Cottin, Drew Starkey, and Sophie Wilde—compete to play… Jonathan Anderson.
We are treated to five bankable, highly paid stars wearing Anderson’s uniform—slouchy flannels, oversized denim, sneakers—sweating through vocal coaching to nail his Northern Irish accent, mimicking his posture, and obsessively rehearsing his signature, awkward runway bow.
And the crowning insult? Jonathan Anderson himself appears on screen, smugly auditioning alongside them and grading their impressions of his own persona.
The sycophantic fashion press immediately fell to its knees, breathlessly praising the sketch as “brilliant meta-humor,” “ironic,” and “self-deprecating.” Really?
Let us call it what it actually is: Pure, Unadulterated, Megalomaniacal Ego.
True irony and wit punch outward. When a creator understands real irony, the joke serves the work, the house, or the emerging talents coming up behind them.
What Anderson has engineered here is a completely closed loop. It is the cynical playbook Demna pioneered at Balenciaga and Gucci, taken to its absolute, suffocating extreme: banish the garments, shove the historic couture ateliers into the shadows, ignore the playwrights who actually need the theater, and make the Creative Director’s own face the primary commodity.
The joke starts with Jonathan Anderson and ends with Jonathan Anderson. It is an inside joke between a designer and famous red-carpet stars, entirely underwritten by Dior’s commercial banking lines. Five Hollywood actors doing community-theater impersonations of Jonathan Anderson is not patronage; it is a paid monument to self-worship.
When a historic Parisian house pays millions not to showcase craft, or design studio but to hire cinema stars to bow like some creative director of the brand, fashion has officially abandoned the stage.
What remains is an ego so inflated it threatens to suffocate whatever real art was left in the room.
