Dior and A24 Are Taking Their Partnership Off Screen

By Rockwell Adams

A24 and Dior could have announced the kind of collaboration audiences already understand. A capsule collection, a costume partnership, a campaign built around an actor, or a limited product connected to an upcoming film. Instead, they chose a theater.

Dior and A24 have entered a two-year partnership that places New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre at the center of the relationship. Dior will serve as the theater’s premier partner as the two companies work across film, theater and live programming, with additional initiatives designed to introduce students to both the creative and practical sides of filmmaking and theater.

The location is what makes the collaboration interesting.

A24 acquired the century-old Off-Broadway theater with Taurus Investment Holdings in 2023 and reopened it in 2025. Since then, Cherry Lane has given the company something different from another screen on which to show its films. The venue has hosted theater, screenings, comedy, music and artist-driven programming, allowing A24’s relationship with audiences to continue beyond a theatrical release or streaming window.

Now Dior is entering that room.

But the fashion house is not approaching the relationship primarily through the familiar language of product placement. Dior creative director Jonathan Anderson made that distinction clear when discussing the partnership with the Financial Times: “I think product placement is so provincial.”

His description of the alternative was much simpler: “This is about believability.”

That gets closer to the actual play.

Dior does not need a handbag prominently placed inside the next A24 film to benefit from A24’s cultural position. Instead, the house can participate in the environment surrounding the filmmakers, playwrights, performers and audiences already moving through that world. Cherry Lane gives that relationship a physical address.

The partnership’s early programming demonstrates what that can look like. Justin Vivian Bond’s Both Ends, inspired by poet and Cherry Lane co-founder Edna St. Vincent Millay, brought Anderson into the production through costume design. Fashion was not positioned beside the performance as an advertisement. It became one of the creative disciplines contributing to what happened onstage.

That distinction matters because fashion and entertainment have been collaborating for decades. Luxury houses dress actors, sponsor festivals, produce films and attach themselves to cultural events around the world. Dior and A24 are not inventing that relationship. They are simply positioning this one differently.

Instead of beginning with what the two companies can sell together, the partnership begins with what they can program together.

Dior has something clear to gain. A24 has built an unusually recognizable cultural identity around filmmakers, performers and stories that frequently sit outside the safest boundaries of mainstream entertainment. That identity also reaches the younger audience Dior wants to remain connected to. Anderson has been direct about that objective, saying of the partnership, “It is more about recruiting a younger generation.”

A24 gains something too. Dior brings resources, global visibility and the reach of one of the world’s most recognizable fashion houses. A24’s Rose Garnett has said Dior can also help amplify particular films and projects during the partnership. That creates an exchange in which neither company needs to become the other.

A24 can continue making and programming entertainment. Dior can continue making fashion. Cherry Lane becomes the place where those worlds occasionally meet.

The student initiatives included in the partnership are worth watching for the same reason. If they develop into meaningful access to artists, production and the business behind creative work, the collaboration begins to extend beyond what audiences see onstage. The next two years will show how substantial that commitment becomes.

There is no need to make the partnership larger than it is. It does not signal the reinvention of luxury, nor does one theater partnership establish a new model for entertainment. The interesting decision is much more immediate.

A24 and Dior chose a physical cultural space at a moment when so much entertainment is designed to reach people without requiring them to enter one.

That makes Cherry Lane more than the backdrop to the announcement. It is the mechanism that makes the partnership make sense. On any given night, there can still simply be actors onstage, furniture arranged for a scene, an audience sitting in the dark and another production underway. Dior does not have to become the subject of that experience to participate in supporting the environment around it.

For two companies already very good at getting people to look at what they make, the next experiment is getting people into the room.

That is the play.