DIOR BACKS A24'S CHERRY LANE THEATRE FOR TWO YEARS

Dior and A24 are not doing a campaign. They are doing a two year partnership, and Dior became premier partner of A24's own Cherry Lane Theatre to prove it. Jonathan Anderson, Dior's creative director, already designed costumes for a play there, not just a fashion film. That distinction, a studio as landlord and collaborator instead of a hired gun, is what matters inside a rollout built to look like just another star studded ad.

Ten Million Dollars Bought A24 a 166 Seat Room

A24 bought Cherry Lane Theatre, the oldest Off Broadway venue in New York, for about 10 million dollars in 2023. The 166 seat West Village house reopened in September 2025 after a renovation that added new seating, a film projector and Wild Cherry, a restaurant from the team behind Frenchette and Le Rock.

Dior is now that theatre's premier partner for two years, a title that comes with money and programming input, not a logo on a step and repeat. The deal also funds student access to Cherry Lane's programming, putting young people on the practical side of a working stage, not just the audience side. The first production under it is Both Ends, a performance by Justin Vivian Bond, and Anderson designed its costumes himself, the same job title he holds on Dior's runway. "This is the start of an exciting partnership built around artists and storytelling," Jonathan Anderson, Dior's creative director, said. "Putting two creatively driven worlds side by side - you start to see what they pull out of each other that neither could've found alone. That's where the interesting stuff happens."

Drew Starkey Was Already Wearing Anderson's Clothes

Drew Starkey is a Dior menswear ambassador, not a random casting choice for the film's ensemble of actors playing Jonathan Anderson. Anderson designed his costumes for Luca Guadagnino's Queer, and Starkey sat front row when Anderson staged Dior Men Summer 2027 inside the Musee Nissim de Camondo, that Paris show, which ran a Fred again.. soundtrack with Little Simz and 070 Shake in the room.

Sophie Wilde carries a matching overlap from A24's side. She starred in Talk to Me, the studio's breakout horror hit, and was already attached to an untitled A24 horror film from director Arkasha Stevenson before this partnership existed. Director Aidan Zamiri, a Glasgow born photographer who shot the launch film, had his own history with Anderson too, through prior campaigns for JW Anderson and Loewe. None of the five actors playing Anderson were cast blind. Both companies pulled from people already inside their own rosters.

Loewe Never Got a Deal Like This One

Anderson ran Loewe for eleven years before Dior named him creative director of its women's, men's and haute couture collections in May 2025, the first designer to hold all three titles since Christian Dior himself. By this winter, his team was running Dior's full collection end to end, men's and women's under one photographic identity for the first time.

Loewe never signed a theatre for two years or put Anderson's name on a costume credit outside fashion. Whatever authority he built at Dior since taking the complete brief, he is spending some of it on live theatre now, not just another campaign shoot. It fits a pattern. His first Dior sneaker, the Roadie, was not a safe reissue in the mold of predecessor Kim Jones. Anderson built it as a suede remake of Nike's abandoned 2005 Considered boot, priced at 1,200 dollars, a bet that Dior's audience would catch a reference only sneaker archivists would recognize. A designer with less institutional room to move does not spend two years of theatre programming on a reference this specific.

Forget the Treadmill Bit. Read the Contract.

The most visible thing Dior and A24 made together is still an ad. Sabrina Carpenter walks a treadmill in Anderson's own flannel, jeans and trainers, doing an impression exaggerated enough that four other actors, Camille Cottin, Josh O'Connor, Drew Starkey and Sophie Wilde, get to repeat the joke as Jonathan Anderson himself closes out the cast list.

That part of the rollout plays like straight stunt casting, the kind A24 has run before with a slate built around one famous face playing an unlikely part. Judged only as a video, it is a well cast joke and nothing more, built to travel fast and be forgotten by the next drop.

The theatre partnership is the part nobody can copy in a week. A rival house can cast five actors as its own designer by Friday afternoon. Buying two years inside a 166 seat Off Broadway stage, funding student access to it, and putting a costume credit on a produced stage play, takes longer than a shoot day and outlasts whatever the algorithm does with the treadmill clip.