Among the Water Lilies, Jennifer Lawrence Leads Dior’s Cruise Campaign at LACMA

Jennifer Lawrence wanders the galleries of a museum on Wilshire Boulevard, playing herself. In the same series of pictures, the art on view includes Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and a Jacob van Ruisdael landscape. The museum is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the clothes are Dior.

The French house has released a preview of its Cruise 2027 campaign, and it was shot at LACMA, the same museum where creative director Jonathan Anderson showed the collection in May. Photographer Sam Rock followed four Dior ambassadors, Jennifer Lawrence, Greta Lee, Taylor Russell and Drew Starkey, through the galleries and had the actors “playing” themselves as they wandered, WWD reported. According to Dior, each of the four has a personal interest in art, and the images are built around it, FashionUnited reported.

The full campaign will be released on October 22, when the collection arrives in stores.

A Campaign About Looking

The idea is a gentle trick on the viewer. Four famous faces, playing themselves, in a museum that is very much real, wearing the collection Anderson first showed there. Dior put the question plainly in a statement quoted by WWD.

“The campaign plays with the way images are mediated in contemporary culture. Are the actors acting for the camera, or not? Is that a shirt, or an artwork?” the brand said.

The shirt in question is real art. Starkey wears shirts from Dior’s collaboration with Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha, printed with text from his work, including a plaid one identical to the shirt Anderson wore for his bow after his spring 2027 show in Paris. Starkey also carries the oversized Dior Double-Up Messenger, a bag with double buckles and flaps. Lee carries the Dior Double, a two-handled satchel. Russell holds the Dior Initials Hobo, a triangular bag with stitched cannage, the quilted pattern long tied to the house. The campaign also features the Dior Granville line, including a black leather shopper and a suede duffle with contrast cannage stitching.

Color does a lot of the work. According to FashionUnited, Anderson’s palette for the collection draws on California, the Technicolor era of Hollywood and Pop Art. The Monet that keeps appearing in the series also links the campaign to the water lily motif of Dior’s autumn and winter 2026 collection.

The Night Dior Came to Wilshire

The campaign is the second act of a May night on Wilshire. On May 13, Anderson staged his first cruise show for Dior on the grounds of LACMA, against the backdrop of the museum’s new David Geffen Galleries, the concrete wing that is the Pritzker Prize winner Peter Zumthor’s first American project. The building, which houses LACMA’s permanent collection, spans Wilshire Boulevard, and its elevated gallery floor creates 3.5 acres of shaded public space below, according to the museum’s guide to the galleries.

Guests sat among curving concrete walls, streetlamps and vintage convertibles as the bassline of Air’s “Sexy Boy” bounced off the concrete and headlights washed over glitter gowns and metallic knits, The Hollywood Reporter wrote. Models sat inside classic American cars in colors like bubblegum and butter, and the show notes arrived in the form of a film script titled “Wilshire Boulevard,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The notes described the set as “an illusion of L.A., in L.A.”

On the runway, The Hollywood Reporter counted 75 models. The Los Angeles Times singled out Anderson’s take on the bar jacket Christian Dior made for Marlene Dietrich to wear in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, a grey flannel coat with a stripe borrowed from Venetian blinds, Philip Treacy hats with feathers spelling words like “Buzz” and “Flow,” and a car-inspired Saddle bag with car paint surfaces and motor key charms. A red velvet dress with a rosette played on Christian Dior’s habit of sending a red dress out partway through a show “simply to wake people up,” the Times reported.

The front row read like a call sheet. Miley Cyrus, Sabrina Carpenter, Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy posed for photos on arrival, joined by Mikey Madison, Tracee Ellis Ross, Macaulay Culkin, Taylor Russell, Al Pacino, Jeff Goldblum, Leslie Mann and Maude Apatow, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Greta Lee and Jisoo were there too. Carpenter wore Anderson’s opening runway look, a sheer pale primrose yellow dress, WWD reported.

“Dior came to L.A.! Everyone should come to L.A.,” Miley Cyrus said on the night, according to WWD.

After the show, guests got a private look at the galleries. Then Dior took over the Chateau Marmont in its entirety, WWD reported, and the crowd drank Champagne and margaritas, ate In-N-Out burgers and sang karaoke. The party grew so packed, with dancers spilling out of the lobby, that some guests left early, The Hollywood Reporter noted.

Ruscha, Rodeo and the Long Romance

Anderson explained the Ruscha shirts in his show notes. “When I think of L.A., I think of Ruscha’s work, which has a fascinating sense of the mundane and how it relates to the city’s grandeur,” he wrote, as quoted by the Los Angeles Times. Ruscha was back at LACMA this fall, as Velvet reported in A Meltdown in Slate Gray, Ed Ruscha Unveils His Digger Poster at LACMA.

The romance between Dior and Hollywood is older than any one season. The house has long dressed leading women on and off the screen, and its ambassadors Jennifer Lawrence and Mikey Madison both wore Dior to accept their Oscars for best actress, as did Michelle Yeoh, WWD noted when the show was announced. Dior’s Los Angeles footprint has grown too. The cruise show followed the opening last year of its Rodeo Drive flagship, designed by the American architect Peter Marino.

Anderson took over as creative director of Dior last year, and The Hollywood Reporter described him as the first designer to oversee all of Dior’s divisions since Christian Dior himself. Since arriving, he has worked with contemporary artists including Sheila Hicks and Magdalene Odundo, and his debut collection for the house was shown against two still lifes by the 18th century painter Jean Siméon Chardin, on loan from the Louvre, WWD reported. The LACMA campaign carries that habit home to a Los Angeles museum.

What It Means for the City

For Los Angeles, the campaign keeps the May show alive on the city’s own terms. The images will arrive with the collection in stores, and the backdrop is a public museum on Wilshire Boulevard, standing in for the glamour of Hollywood.

Dior’s Beverly Hills store is leaning into art this month as well. From October 3 through 16, Dior Beverly Hills is staging an exhibition devoted to the late French artist Louis Cane and his wife, Nicole Cane, with bronze trees, figurative pieces, lanterns with monkey motifs and furniture decorated with butterflies, ahead of a December 8 tribute sale at Christie’s Rockefeller Center in New York, WWD reported.

The Cruise 2027 campaign preview is out now, and the full campaign arrives on October 22 along with the collection in Dior stores. The Louis Cane exhibition is at Dior Beverly Hills through October 16. LACMA’s permanent collection lives in the David Geffen Galleries on Wilshire Boulevard.