See the 1949 Dior Gown That Inspired Anya Taylor-Joy’s 2024 Oscars Look
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Just as the new Apple TV+ series The New Look takes viewers back to the 1940s — when Christian Dior erupted onto the fashion scene — the 2024 Oscars also provided a portal back to that era of elegance.
Academy Awards presenter and Dune: Part Two actress Anya Taylor-Joy stunned Sunday night wearing a Dior Haute Couture crystal-encrusted scalloped dress that was actually inspired by two gowns from 1949.
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Both are currently on view at a breathtaking fashion exhibition, “Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style,” which is on view through Aug. 11 at San Francisco’s de Young Museum (which has the dresses in its permanent collection).
The pair of famed archival dresses are called “Junon” And “Venus” and were part of Christian Dior’s fall/winter 1949-1950 haute-couture collection. To create a modern version for Taylor-Joy (an ambassador for the luxury house since 2021), Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri fashioned a slimmed-down silhouette, which pulls from the scalloped look of the “Junon” dress as well as the bodice details of the “Venus” gown.
“When she walked out, I knew immediately what it was. It was just a much slimmer version of what the original dress was,” designer and TV personality Jenna Lyons tells The Hollywood Reporter of seeing Taylor-Joy, one of this year’s best dressed stars at the Oscars, wear the Dior confection. “It was stunning.”
Laura Camerlengo, the curator of the de Young’s “Fashioning San Francisco” exhibit, further explained the inspiration in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.
“It’s a reinterpretation of both sister dresses,” said Camerlengo. “There are elements particularly of the decorative treatments and the embellishments that are much more similar to ‘Venus’, especially the long pailette sequins that you see along the edges of each petal; that sort of grayish-blue tone is much more similar to ‘Junon’. But the bodice treatment, which is rather columnar in construction, reminds me more of some of Dior’s design for fall/winter 1952-53.”
According to the Chronicle, the department store I. Magnin & Company donated the two dresses to the museum in 1949.
This is not the first time that the “Junon” dress has inspired a new look for a celebrity. At the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, Dior ambassador Natalie Portman, there to promote her film May December, wore a sweeping evening gown that also recreated the original’s scalloped design.
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