Dior and A24 launch a two-year fashion and film partnership at Cherry Lane Theatre

Dior and A24 have announced a two-year partnership built around the Cherry Lane Theatre, the Off-Broadway venue A24 backs in New York's West Village. The program spans fashion, film and theater, mixing on-screen and in-person events. It marks Dior's first sustained tie-up with an entertainment label rather than a single campaign or red carpet moment.

The news arrived through a short film directed by Aidan Zamiri, in which actors Sabrina Carpenter, Josh O'Connor, Drew Starkey, Camille Cottin and Sophie Wilde audition to play Dior's own creative director, Jonathan Anderson. Each performs the same look: checkered shirt, jeans, hands in pockets, a deadpan send-up of Anderson's own uniform.

The partnership opens with Both Ends, a one-night-only production marking the first anniversary of A24's reopening of Cherry Lane. Written by Justin Vivian Bond, produced and directed by Zack Winokur, it draws on the poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of the theater's co-founders.

What Anderson costumed for the opening night

Anderson designed costumes for the production himself and dressed Bond, who stars in it, in an archival garment by Paul Poiret. Poiret was an inspiration behind Dior's Autumn/Winter 2026 collection, and Anderson has said the designer shaped Millay's own sense of style as well, tying the play's history to the house's current runway.

Cherry Lane Theatre has been under A24's stewardship since a revival last fall, and the venue has kept a busy slate of shows and full houses since. A24 points to Gen Z as the demographic driving cinema sales in the United States, and to a wider appetite among younger audiences for communion in live cultural spaces.

Dior becomes Cherry Lane's main partner for the length of the deal, with programming intended to connect audiences to both established and emerging artists. The stated aim is live experience over advertising: fashion reaching audiences on-screen, onstage and in the room, rather than through a seasonal campaign or a cinematic bag placement.

Anderson framed the logic to the Financial Times as one of proving a brand's reality rather than performing it. "It is about selling the idea that a brand is real," he said, describing entry into the public imagination as something that now runs well past the expected red carpet look or film cameo.

He described the joint ambition with A24 in similarly open terms. "Through A24, we are both working on a way in which we can try to get into the cultural zeitgeist," he said. "Is it in theatre? Is it in the blockbuster? We won't know that until we go into a lab process and try to work out what's next."

In the announcement video, Anderson called it "the start of an exciting partnership built around artists and storytelling." He added: "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."

How the deal fits Dior's online popularity

We have ranked Dior as the most popular luxury brand online, ahead of Gucci and Chanel, in our review of the 15 most popular luxury brands, built from Google Trends search interest alongside brand value and social conversation data. A cultural partnership of this scale extends that visibility beyond seasonal campaigns and product drops.

Our coverage of style has also tracked Dior's handbags as part of the house's enduring commercial core, alongside houses like Hermès and Chanel, in our guide to the best designer bags of all time. A theater and film partnership adds cultural presence to that product story rather than serving as a specific launch.

The deal follows a pattern of luxury houses experimenting with entertainment tie-ins beyond runway shows and celebrity ambassadors, though Dior has not previously committed to a multi-year residency of this kind at a single theater. A24, known for independent film, gives the house a venue built on cultural credibility rather than scale.

Neither party has disclosed the financial terms of the two-year agreement, nor named the full slate of programming beyond the opening production. What form the promised "lab process" Anderson described will take, whether more theater, film or something unannounced, remains open by his own account.

The companies have not given a date for further programming beyond Both Ends, which stages once to mark Cherry Lane's first year back under A24. Whether the partnership yields recurring seasonal events or a single annual centerpiece has not been specified in the announcement.

Dior's own Autumn/Winter 2026 collection already carried Poiret's influence before the partnership was announced, which is part of why Anderson chose the designer's archival garment for Both Ends rather than a newly made piece. The choice links the stage costume directly back to a collection already on the runway.

For a house whose commercial identity still rests heavily on its handbags and ready to wear, a theater residency is a departure in form rather than in ambition. It is another route to the same goal our earlier ranking already measured: keeping Dior the name most searched among its luxury peers.