Dior reveals itself postmodern, the sensual elegance of Tom Ford

"Change is inevitable," declare the accompanying notes of the Dior show. It is Jonathan Anderson's debut: one of the most eagerly anticipated events of the season; a titanic feat, to make veins and wrists quiver. Anderson is as resolute in resetting as he is delicate and fresh in tone of expression. He does not arrive at the maison with the Hun's fury of the destroyer, with the fearless courage of he who resets to start again, but with the political and post-modern flair of the recapitulator, resolute in wanting to imprint his own authorial mark by including traces and relics of a long and august history, and of those who animated it.

In this regard, the show is introduced by a journalistic documentary by Adam Curtis, entitled Do You Dare Entering The House Of Dior, which through a tight montage of archive footage alternating with scenes from horror films, recapitulates salient moments while capturing, or rather suggesting, the newcomer's panic terror. Projected onto the faces of an inverted pyramid, the footage is eventually absorbed into a box at the base of this one, as if to say: the story is there, but it has to be put in a folder, like a memory to return to from time to time.

The fashion show starts there, with a little dress taken from the archives and modernised, and then moves in multiple directions, from extreme fashion to apparent normality, from the inescapable bar silhouette, presented in a shrunken, very short form, to floating capes, to an abstract interpretation - not exactly a happy one - of eighteenth-century baskets, all topped off with very aptly designed bags and a variety of shoes.

It is as much, perhaps too much, as is legitimate for a debut that should be seen as a series of possibilities, without considering the fact that the theme of refracted, rather than monolithic, identity is central to Anderson's design approach, as seen by Loewe. The web is instantly divisive, always inexorable and cutting, but although not explosive it is a safe debut, in which the real novelty is the empathetic tone of expression, a thousand miles away from the emphasis of the past.

The scene is nocturnal - blue of the sea at midnight, in the moonlight - by Tom Ford, but the temperature is hot, the seduction irrepressible, the desire overflowing. Now in his second try as creative director, Haider Ackermann continues to move confidently within the codes defined by Tom, namely a glittering, erotically charged idea of linearity, but he takes it in an even more linear and elegant direction, if possible, but phosphorescently more erotic, almost intoxicating, always polished and re-polished. All it takes is a leather bra peeking out from under an impeccable jacket, the pallor of nylon on an albino body, the flicker of skin in tralice between the meshes of a patent leather net to break the enchantment of the algid and irreproachable appearance, opening glimmers of seditious seduction.