When Jonathan Anderson visits Christian Dior’s extensive archive, known as Dior Heritage, he looks not only for inspiration in the form of a button, textile swatch, or cut, but for traces of Monsieur Dior himself.  He finds them in garments, of course, but also in the Frenchman’s biography, his business sense, biography, sketches, and superstitions.

In this installment of Vogue’s Objects of Affection series, the designer shares some of his discoveries. The video also inadvertently reveals commonalities between the house founder and its creative director. The way Anderson speaks of M. Dior, as “a bit of an alchemist because he looks back to be able to reconstruct the future,” is how many people speak of the Irishman.

La Cigale, an architectural dress from 1952 with a skirt that juts out in four points is Anderson’s favorite Dior design, but his tour of the history of Dior starts, almost by default, with the Bar Suit of 1947, the foundation around which the look, and the business, of the house has been built over decades. Anderson shows how a parka designed by John Galliano—which he says he’d wear with jeans and boots to walk to work—borrows pockets from the Arizona coat of 1948.

Anderson is the house’s seventh creative director post M. Dior and his take on the history of the brand is that “It’s like great cinema.

It has everything in it, ups and downs, it has had multiple cast and crew. It reinvents itself.”

Director: Nikki Petersen

Director of Photography: Etienne Baussan

Editor: Katie Wolford

Producers: Chase Lewis, Amaury Delcambre

Associate Producer: Lea Donenberg

Gaffer: Adam Pelle

Audio: Colin Larchet

Production Coordinator: Tanía Jones

Production Manager: Kristen Helmick, Evie Roop

Line Producer: Natasha Soto-Albors

Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow

Post Production Coordinator: Holly Frew

Supervising Editor: Kameron Key

Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch

Executive Producer: Rahel Gebreyes

Senior Director, Video: Romy van den Broeke

Senior Director, Programming: Linda Gittleson

VP, Video Programming: Thespena Guatieri