The Dior Bambou Pavilion is the conceptual flagship that Dior opened in 2026 in Daikanyama, Shibuya, to anchor its Tokyo presence definitively in a space that is something other than a boutique. One thousand eight hundred square metres in the prestigious Sarugakuchō neighbourhood — a zen garden, a koi carp pond, a floral oasis, a façade reinterpreting the 30 avenue Montaigne through details in golden bamboo. The interior draws on local Japanese savoir-faire — shoji paper panels, traditional hand-painted lanterns — in dialogue with the visual codes of the House. The restaurant, conceived exclusively by chef Anne-Sophie Pic, offers a menu where Dior's codes — the cannage motif, buttons, iconic silhouettes — are read in flavours: matcha, yuzu, sake, rice. Jonathan Anderson's ready-to-wear collections are presented on the ground floor. This is not a shop. It is an address.

Jonathan Anderson was appointed artistic director of all Dior collections in June 2025 — the first to oversee menswear, womenswear and haute couture simultaneously since Christian Dior himself. He is forty-one years old. He left Loewe, which he had led for twelve years and transformed into one of the most coveted houses in the world, to take on the House whose foundations are the most laden in the industry. His first menswear collection was presented in June 2025, his first womenswear collection in October, in an ephemeral structure at the Tuileries with a film by Adam Curtis as the opening — a filmmaker known for his documentaries on individualism and power, a choice that says something about Anderson's intent. "My idea is that we need to decrypt and reprogram Dior," he said. The first mixed campaign in the House's history accompanied the arrival of these collections in boutique — including the Bambou Pavilion in Tokyo, which received the pieces of this new era several thousand kilometres from where they were conceived.

The pre-fall 2025 collection, the last womenswear collection signed by Maria Grazia Chiuri before the appointment of Jonathan Anderson, was presented on 15 April 2025 in the garden of the Tō-ji temple in Kyoto — a Buddhist temple listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, with its five-storey pagoda, its tortoises and its koi carp in the pond. Chiuri collaborated with two Kyoto ateliers: Kihachi Tabata, a kimono dyer specialising in hikizome — brush-applied dyeing, laid down layer by layer and fixed with steam, which gives fabrics a transparency and depth that industrial methods cannot produce — and Tatsumura Textile, which recreated the original 1953 brocade for the Jardin Japonais dress. The collection makes visible what the Dior-Japan relationship has always been: not a source of folkloric inspiration, but a technical conversation between people who share the conviction that the quality of a fabric is a moral decision as much as an aesthetic one.

In 1959, six years after the first show in Japan, Dior was chosen to create the three civilian dresses for the wedding of Princess Michiko to Crown Prince Akihito. The dresses were made from Japanese textiles — a gesture saying that the House had not come to impose Paris but to engage with what Japan knew how to produce. The future empress of Japan chose a French House that had taken care to learn what Japanese fabric means before cutting it. This decision is not incidental in a country whose imperial family is the most symbolically charged embodiment of national tradition. It consecrated the Dior-Japan relationship as one of mutual respect, not aesthetic colonisation. Dior did not come to Japan with its codes. It came with its questions.