Jonathan Anderson could hardly have asked for a better stage. On a brilliant spring day in the Tuileries Garden, his models crossed a bridge over a water-lily pond and circled a glasshouse he’d had built specially for the audience, with the Louvre visible in one direction and the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde in the other. The setting wasn’t incidental — it was the argument.

“It’s a promenade, the idea of people dressing up to walk in the park,” Anderson said, and the collection delivered exactly that feeling. Where his debut womenswear show last season carried the weight of a designer still finding his footing at one of fashion’s most loaded houses, this one felt like a man who has stopped looking over his shoulder.

The opening look set the tone immediately — the Dior Bar jacket, that most totemic of silhouettes, reimagined as a shrunken grey knit cardigan with a scrolling peplum worn over a white multilayered, scallop-edged skirt with a train that caught the breeze as the model walked. Corseted and constricting it was not. “We’ve taken all the structure out — it’s light,” Anderson said, and you could feel it in everything that followed: trouser suits in menswear checks treated as prints on minutely pleated silk, coats wrapped like dressing gowns, clothes that moved with the body rather than directing it.

Multiple variations on the Bar jacket came across the bridge, none of them architectural in the traditional Dior sense. One, in gilded lamé looped up at one side and trimmed with shearling, was paired with pale denim jeans embroidered with a silvery scalloped pattern derived from Christian Dior’s 1949 Junon ball gown — a very Anderson equation, archive and instinct woven together without reverence tipping into pastiche.

There was more Paul Poiret in the air than Dior, if anything — the balloon trousers, the flowered lamé fabrics — alongside nods to the 18th-century frock coats Anderson has long been drawn to, appearing here with waterfall shearling collars or made entirely from crisp lace. The water lilies floating in the pond — artificial, naturally — inspired raffia flowers blooming on an asymmetrical lace dress, and sandals that echoed their shape.

The glasshouse views, the royal history of the gardens, Monet’s garden at Giverny a short distance away with its famous paintings at the Orangerie — Anderson was clearly thinking about all of it, about Dior’s place at the very pinnacle of Parisian luxury and what it means to inhabit that position rather than simply manage it. How did he feel about where things stand? “I feel relieved,” he said. “Because it’s proven it’s working in the stores.”