THE LOEWE SHOW HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
So ran headlines around the world on the morning of March 5th, 2021, inside actual copies of the New York Times, Le Monde, and The Times of London.
It was the day the show was supposed to happen. Jonathan Anderson, then the visionary Creative Director of Spanish luxury house Loewe, had been scheduled to present his Fall presentation in Paris, if only COVID-19 restrictions hadn’t rendered the runway impossible.
So, Anderson – Irish, contrarian, and categorically allergic to all that’s mainstream – decided that if fashion couldn’t come to the people, the people would get fashion delivered to their doorsteps… with their morning coffee!
The 64-page mock broadsheet featured not just the collection itself – in electrifyingly bold colors and zig-zag prints that crackled against the otherwise sepia tone of newsprint – but also the first chapter of Danielle Steel’s latest novel, The Affair, serialized like a Victorian periodical, as well as a character study of model Freja Beha Erichsen by photographer Fumiko Imano.
VVIPs received this special supplement with a custom-engraved bone paper-knife complete with a personalized metal case. New York Times subscribers in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Le Monde readers in Lyon, and a million others who’d never attended a fashion show (and probably never would) received it with their daily crossword puzzles and a sense of bewilderment.
Inside the fashion world, the reaction was one of reverence: how creative! How pandemic-era! How utterly Jonathan! Outside it, unsuspecting bystanders who had no idea how to pronounce Loewe were utterly mystified.
Five years later, with artificial intelligence flooding our feeds and print media in freefall (so much so that basically the entirety of The Devil Wears Prada 2 is dedicated to the plotline), it appears that Anderson is back again in the newsprint game, this time as the chief creative of the House of Dior.
Only now, he’s not quite alone.
The Girls are Fighting
And by girls, I do refer to fully-grown men.
You see, in the rather hush-hush world of haute couture, fashion feuds often become the stuff of legend. Tom Ford and Yves Saint Laurent. Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. Armani and Versace. Alaïa and Anna.
But arguably fashion’s most famous troublemaker was Gabrielle Coco Chanel.
“Look how ridiculous these women are,” she once said, “They were wearing clothes by a man who doesn’t know women, never had one, and dreams of being one,”referring to none other than Monsieur Christian Dior himself. “Dior doesn’t dress women,” she later added, “He upholsters them.”
And while I don’t necessarily disagree with her thesis that Dior dressed women “like old armchairs,” in a delicious turn of events, Matthieu Blazy, the man now sitting at the head of Chanel itself, just sent a camellia-adorned ballgown, a coat, a frilly shirtdress, and a skirt-suit down the runway at the brand’s Cruise 2027 presentation, all swathed in newsprint – a print so historically, architecturally, culturally, and almost inescapably associated with the House of Dior, Coco would almost certainly have had some thoughts.
Though to his credit, Blazy arrived at the print through Gabrielle herself, and the collection was conceived at Biarritz, the resort town where Chanel once maintained a boutique, entertained lovers, and read the newspaper. Like, literally. Her quote was: “I like to read the newspaper, like men.”
What makes it all the more salacious, however, is that across the pond, within the gasoline-and-tuberose-scented walls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Jonathan Anderson unveiled his own iteration of the newsprint: a Bow Bag covered in the “Christian Dior Daily” print, the same fictional broadsheet invented by predecessor John Galliano in 2000.
The Dior website also hosts myriad other silhouettes in the same print – Saddle Bags, Book Totes, and Lady Dior bags, a resurrection of the brand’s own mythmaking, and by Anderson’s logic, a print that now belongs to this house.
But does the newspaper print really belong to either of those houses?
Fresh Off the Fashion Press
For his Spring 1999 lineup, John Galliano sent a model down the Dior runway in an ivory bias-cut slip dress with “c-c-c-curly” hair, i.e., a woman who looked, as Chelsea Fairless of the Every Outfit podcast says, “freakishly similar to Carrie Bradshaw.” In fact, as Fairless goes on, “This collection actually featured a small army of Carrie Bradshaws, all of whom are wearing slightly different variations of the dress.” Carrie herself then shows up, in season 2 of Sex and the City, wearing the dress to Big and Natasha’s engagement party.
“I also imagine this is what Natasha’s nightmares must have looked like,” Fairless concludes.
For Fall 2000, Galliano then took the same slip silhouette and rendered it in floor-to-ceiling newsprint. His own headlines, his own masthead: Christian Dior Daily, across coats, tuxes, boots, Saddle bags – and one scandalizing bias-cut dress that Carrie would wear again for Natasha’s second nightmare trip: “Now not only have you ruined my marriage, you’ve ruined my lunch.”
Here was a woman who’d decided that if her life is going to be tabloid fodder, she might as well wear it.” A writer,” wrote the New York Times, “literally clothed in the medium that fed her.” On a lunch that goes astronomically awry. In the city that is the very protagonist of Sex and the City.
The cultural half-life of that image endures to this day, and it was this dress that went on to create history – selling for a whopping €72,000 in June 2024, against a meager estimate of €800 to €1,000, while newsprint Saddle Bags surface occasionally between $12,500 and $16,900 (and don’t stay surfaced long). Jenna Ortega wore an archive piece last year. As does Emily Blunt, as Emily Charlton in The Devil Wears Prada 2. In 2026, it seems, Christian Dior Daily has better circulation than most actual newspapers.
Read All About It!
But even Galliano wasn’t the first to do newsprints.
While his inspiration for the collection — dubbed “Hobo Chic” (causing considerable discomfort and general outrage at its central conceit) – was drawn from the homeless people he’d seen sleeping under newspapers on late-night walks along the Seine, the original credits for the newsprint go to another notable Coco Chanel rival, Madame Elsa Schiaparelli.
In 1935, Schiaparelli reportedly clipped press clippings of her own reviews, stuck them together “like a puzzle,” and had them printed on silk. The inspiration? A fish market in Copenhagen, as she describes in her autobiography, “where old women sat for hours on the banks of the canals amidst waves of silver-scaled fish that were still alive and shimmering. These women wore on their heads newspapers twisted into queer shapes of hats.”
The result? Her critics’ words – complimentary or not – became her armor. Almost immediately after, Louis Réard fashioned the first bikini from newsprint. “A knowing wink,” writes British Vogue, “to the fact he understood the tiny two-piece would create global headlines.” And before them all, the suffragettes had used text-based accessories as protest branding – turning the language of print into the language of resistance.
The print has since become a house code for Galliano’s namesake label, models at Emilia Wickstead walked down the Fall 2025 runway show holding a copy of The Wickstead Times, and Stella McCartney then retorted with her own, The Stella Times. And as eager Blazy fans would tell you, the Spring 2024 dispatch for Bottega Veneta not only featured vintage-looking leather newspapers as accessories, but also runway-only handbags in the same print!
But in 2026, the actual newspaper — the one with real headlines, not the ones printed on sublime silk — carries, on most days, difficult stories, stories of sorrow, struggles, and sufferings. And draping that – on a Bow Bag, on a ball gown, on a body – carries with it a much deeper connotation than just fashion.
Schiaparelli clothed herself in her critics’ reviews, and the suffragettes wore their own demands. When Carrie walked to that disastrous lunch in the newsprint slip, she was wearing the tabloid machinery that confined her everywhere she went. Perhaps today, to wear the newsprint means to step out of the bubble of our own making, to remember that the world outside is still printing.
“Why, as a society, are we scared of mass?” Anderson said when he presented that ill-fated lockdown-era Loewe lineup. Five years later, I’m not sure we still have an answer to that.
