PARIS, March 4 — Dior creative director Jonathan Anderson showed floating flower-shaped dresses and heels decorated with water lilies for his first autumn/winter womenswear collection at the Parisian fashion house yesterday, as luxury conglomerate LVMH tries to breathe new life into the brand and revive sales.

Staged above an octagonal pond in Paris’ Tuileries gardens on a sunny spring day, the collection continued Anderson’s nature theme with ostrich feather trims on coats and the hem of one dress evoking a bunch of arum lilies. Jeans covered in silver sequins were paired with intricately ruffled shirts and jackets.

“This marks Jonathan Anderson’s fifth show for the house and his second for women’s ready-to-wear, and, for me, it is his strongest collection to date,” said Simon Longland, director of fashion buying at Harrods.

Alongside Louis Vuitton, Dior is a key pillar of LVMH’s LVMH.PA fashion and leather goods business, and Bernstein analyst Luca Solca estimates the brand’s sales declined 6-8% last year.

Anderson, who previously led LVMH-owned Loewe for 11 years, has already made his mark on Dior, releasing a new take on Dior’s classic cotton canvas tote bags featuring stylised book titles, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and French classics Madame Bovary, Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Bonjour Tristesse.

Top fashion brands presenting their new collections at Paris Fashion Week must balance luxury consumers’ demand for innovative, high-end designs with the need to win back stretched middle-class shoppers as the sector faces its worst slowdown in years, following steep price hikes. — Reuters