"It starts off with chiffon," Jonathan Anderson said a couple of hours before his seventh women's collection in a year, and that sentence explains the whole show. The runway ran across a pond in the middle of the Tuileries Garden. It was late September and still so hot in Paris that Dior installed roller blinds and ceiling fans on its veranda-style set and handed out mineral water while everyone waited for Rihanna.

A Dior mist blew across the water. I think the heat is the real subject here. Anderson said, "I'll never forget being that hot," about his menswear show in July, and this collection is his answer to dressing for a warmer world without giving up the house's shape.

Christian Dior founded the house in 1947 on the tiny-waisted Bar jacket and the circle skirt. Anderson takes those and makes them nearly transparent. There are tiny, layered, semi-sheer circle skirts under pinstripe or tweed-print chiffon blazers, and a Bar jacket that seems woven from flyaway ribbons.

More than half the looks have a jacket or coat, so the tailoring is still the backbone, but none of it is heavy. He said he wants "to remove the heaviness of the heritage of a brand like Dior," and I think he does it literally. A tweed that is only a print on chiffon is a very clever joke about how much a jacket really needs to weigh.

His menswear keeps leaking in, and I like it. A black and white tweed-print chiffon coat goes over a sheer checked shirt and trousers. Blue and white striped bias-cut blouses sit over low-slung micropleat skirts. There are pajama tops, shawl-collar smoking jackets and khaki outdoor pieces that look easy to wear every day.

More than a quarter of the looks are mini length, and about as many have trousers. Printed florals turn up on only a handful of looks, and the flowers that stay with you are the three-dimensional ones: pastel layers, and one look like a bunch of pink and white hydrangeas trailing a frothy petal boa.

The number that jumped out is the bags. Nearly every look in the show carries one, which tells you how seriously Anderson takes the accessories business. The look I would point to, though, is Look 26, a slim, impeccable black coat that stood alone in all the pink plissé.

It read like a quiet salute to Mathilde Favier, the Dior figure who died earlier this summer. That is the side of Dior that public women rely on, and it is good to see it kept. If I were starting anywhere, it would be with a sheer layer over a crisp striped shirt, and a bag you will carry for years.