Dior and A24 Just Turned a Hundred-Year-Old Theatre Into Their Shared Stage

DRIFT AUDIO

Listen to this story

Choose a voice, then press play.

Voice Woman Man

Play Stop

0%

A two-year partner makes Dior the lead patron of A24’s Cherry Lane Theatre, unveiled with a film of five stars failing to impersonate Jonathan Anderson.

On September 9, the Instagram accounts for Dior, Jonathan Anderson, and A24 all posted the same brief, unexplained clip: Sabrina Carpenter and Anderson walking side by side on adjacent treadmills, both dressed in an unbuttoned flannel shirt, a white tee, jeans, and Salomon sneakers, the outfit Anderson has repeated often enough this year that it now reads as his off-duty uniform. No caption, no context. By the next morning, the Financial Times had the actual story. Dior and A24 had sign a two-year partner, and its home base would be Cherry Lane Theatre, the 167-seat Off-Broadway house A24 bought in Manhattan’s West Village in 2023.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by The Corator (@the.corator)

stir

Dior becomes Cherry Lane’s premier partner for two years, backing a program of film, theatre, talks, and live events at the venue. The house will also amplify and support select projects from A24’s broader slate, and the partnership includes an education strand that gives students access to the creative and practical sides of making theatre and film. Both companies have been explicit that the point isn’t turn a hundred-year-old stage into a two-year Dior billboard. The stated goal is a credible cultural presence built alongside A24’s own community rather than sold to it, aimed at an audience fashion has struggled to hold onto without a transaction attached.

A24 has spent thirteen years turning restraint into its own brand, releasing more than 150 films and dozens of television series, including Moonlight, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Euphoria, since Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges founded the company in 2012. It has also built a parallel reputation, not always a flattering one, for merchandise drops tied to its films, a habit that has drawn its own share of fatigue complaints. Cherry Lane gives that same instinct toward consumer culture a physical, non-retail outlet, and now a fashion house’s money behind it.

flow

Anderson has run Dior’s women’s, men’s, and haute couture collections since taking the job last year, following eleven years reshaping Loewe, a run that ended when LVMH moved him to the French house instead. He met Rose Garnett, the head of A24’s UK arm, while working on the costumes for Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer, the Daniel Craig-led adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella, which A24 released alongside a companion merch line built from Anderson’s own designs. The two spent the time since figuring out a longer-term way to put fashion and film in the same room, landing eventually on Cherry Lane rather than another one-off premiere dress or capsule drop.

That same reporting frames Dior’s relationship to the stage and screen as an old habit the house had let go quiet, not a new pivot. The more urgent problem, in Anderson’s own diagnosis to the Financial Times, was blunt for a creative director announcing a marketing partnership: fashion “is not part of the cultural public imagination at the moment,” and the industry needs to diversify to find its way back in. Beyond the opening night at Cherry Lane, neither company has published a full calendar for the two years ahead, describing the rest only as a curated slate still being built out.

cen

The building at 38 Commerce Street has had a stranger résumé than most Off-Broadway houses. It went up in 1817 as a farm silo, then spent a century doing time as a brewery, a tobacco warehouse, a box factory, and, for one stretch, a gay bar, before the Provincetown Players, a troupe that counted the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay among its members, converted it into a 200-seat theatre in 1923. Scenic designer Cleon Throckmorton handled the fit-out, and the entertainer George M. Cohan reportedly took one look and cracked that you might as well act in a telephone booth.

That telephone booth went on to host premieres by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Amiri Baraka, and Sam Shepard, whose True West played there in 1982. Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell opened at Cherry Lane in 1971, and Lorraine Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black premiered on Commerce Street in 1969. A teenage Barbra Streisand worked there moving sets and painting scenery before working her way up to understudy. Angelina Fiordellisi bought the building in 1996 for $1.7 million, put another $3 million into renovating it, and ran it until she sold it to A24 in March 2023 for just over $10 million, after an earlier planned sale to the Lucille Lortel Theatre Foundation fell apart in 2021. Fiordellisi has since said that former patrons regularly stop her to say the theatre was the backdrop to a first date or some other night they still remember, a kind of civic attachment that a two-year Dior sponsorship now has to work alongside rather than paper over.

define

A24 reopened Cherry Lane in September 2025 after a two-year renovation that kept the original stage and details intact while adding new seating, a film projector, and Wild Cherry, a restaurant and bar from the team behind Frenchette. The venue’s first long-run booking was WEER, a solo show by clown-comedian Natalie Palamides that had already broken out at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Dani Rait, a former Saturday Night Live booker hired to run programming, has described the venue’s approach as genre-agnostic by design, mixing multiweek theatre runs with one-night film screenings, comedy sets, and concerts rather than sorting by discipline. Past programming has included a Tame Impala video series directed by Sean Durkin and a screening series curated by Sofia Coppola. Dior’s arrival adds a fashion house to that same rotation rather than building it a separate wing.

tell

Dior announce the partners with a short film instead of a press rel, directed by Aidan Zamiri, who also directed A24’s Charli xcx feature The Moment. Over roughly two and a half minutes, Carpenter, Drew Starkey, Josh O’Connor, Camille Cottin, and Sophie Wilde each take a turn trying to become Anderson: the hunched post-runway bow, the Northern Irish accent, none of it quite landing. Wilde’s attempt ends with her screaming and collapsing to the floor. Anderson shows up at the end to play the one part nobody else could pull off. Starkey, who starred in Queer, already had some sense of his subject going in. Carpenter, mid-treadmill, sums up the difficulty by noting how much Anderson tightens his jaw, which she figures must make the impression even harder.

Zamiri built his name directing music videos, including Charli xcx’s viral “360,” before The Moment turned her Brat-era stardom into a mockumentary that became one of A24’s fastest-selling limited releases. Handing him the Dior job keeps the whole campaign inside a small, repeat cast of collaborators rather than importing an outside advertising director, the same logic that put Starkey in front of the camera again after Queer.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by PERFECT (@theperfectmagazine)

huh

The partnership’s opening event doubled as a tribute to the building itself. Cherry Lane marked the first anniversary of its reopening with a one-night show of Both Ends, written by Justin Vivian Bond and produced and directed by Zack Winokur, its title borrow from Millay’s 1918 quatrain “First Fig,” four lines about a candle burn at both ends that will not last the night. It is a fitting enough theme for a show staged inside a build whose own survive, across two centuries of brew lease, box-factory tenants, and near-sales, was never especially guaranteed either. Anderson designed the costumes, dressing Bond in an archival Paul Poiret piece that also shaped his own Winter 2026 collection for Dior, a small closed loop between a designer working from a century-old wardrobe and a theatre built by one of that wardrobe’s contemporaries. Winokur and Bond had collaborated once before, on 2021’s Only an Octave Apart with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, for which Anderson built most of the costumes from scratch and adapted others from existing JW Anderson and Loewe pieces.

praxis

Carpenter’s role in the campaign isn’t a cold booking. She opened Coachella in April with a ninety-minute, Hollywood-themed headline set staged as five distinct scenes, walking on to a replica Walk of Fame in a sequin red mini dress and match peacoat before work through four more costume changes, all of it custom Dior by Anderson and style by her longtime convincer Jared Ellner. She wasn’t the only Dior look on the festival grounds that weekend either; Ethel Cain performed a separate set at the Mojave Tent in a full Dior look of distressed overalls and combat boots. By Launchmetrics’ accounting, Carpenter’s Coachella run alone generated roughly $3.6 million in earned media value for the house, a fraction of the $90 million the brand pulled from its own Fall 2026 womenswear runway show but a clear sign the strategy of dressing pop stars ahead of any formal ambassador deal, a pattern Anderson also used with Blackpink’s Jisoo during her Deadline Tour, keeps working. It made Carpenter, without any title attached, the most visible face of Anderson’s Dior over the past several months, ahead of the house’s own regular roster of front-row names. Measured against the two-year run A24 just handed the house, the Cherry Lane campaign reads less like the start of something new than the second act of a relationship that had already been paying off in headlines since the desert.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by TianweiZhang (@tianweizhang)

fin

Nylon had already floated the idea that 2026 was shaping up to be the year of the fashion film a full day before Dior’s announcement landed, and the timing made an unintentionally strong case for the argument. Dior isn’t alone in making this bet. Saint Laurent launched its own production arm, Saint Laurent Productions, in 2023, financing shorts and features by directors including Pedro Almodóvar and David Cronenberg with Anthony Vaccarello designing costumes rather than branding the screen. Maison Margiela is taking a similar swing with Anonymity, a documentary directed by Thibaut Grevet and starring Rebecca Hall, timed to debut alongside the house’s coming SS27 collection. Creative director debuts increasingly arrive with teasers and trailers instead of lookbooks, and runway campaigns get cut like short films rather than shot like ads. Cinema, for the moment, still produces stories that travel through popular culture without asking for a sale in the same breath, which is the exact thing fashion has had trouble doing on its own lately. Cherry Lane Theatre now has two years to find out how much of that actually transfers.