The ceremonial 2018 changing of the guard at the top of the Paris menswear establishment is now complete: Kim Jones has shown at Christian Dior, three days after his friend and mentee Virgil Abloh swept all before him on his rainbow-hue runway at Louis Vuitton. Here are the headlines on how it went: Jones co-opted the women’s couture mentality of Dior, and Abloh elevated the language of streetwear. Two sides of a coin which belongs to the luxury currency of LVMH, now being freshly minted.
Where to start? There was a Prince, Nikolai of Denmark, for openers—in a white-and-shirting-stripe, inside out, sartorially skilled check collage of a suit and sneakers. There was a monumental floral cartoon teddy bear effigy of Christian Dior by KAWS. There was an overexcited front row of celebrities, designers, real-life friends, and presiding corporate dignitaries. There were Kim Jones’s Instagram posts showing Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss, posing in the studio. And then there was his theory, imparted in the Dior Homme showroom, about it being time for couture values to be imported into menswear. “I’d call it romantic, rather than feminine,” he said, thus joining his point of view to this week’s conversations on the topic with designers as chalk-and-cheese as John Galliano at Maison Margiela and Raf Simons.
Jones then rattled through the nuances: how he got tiny feathered flowers made to mimic the exact color and pattern of Monsieur Dior’s porcelain dinner service—and then trapped the result under plastic, in jackets. How he had toile de Jouy patterns made to imitate the fabric on the walls of the first boutique M. Dior had, in 1947. Why the bee motif—a symbol Dior used in 1955. Why the “Cannage” café-chair canework pattern which he’d laser-cut into panels on the back of an ordinaire-seeming bourgeois trenchcoat and bag. Why rose pink suits popped up: Dior was a rose fanatic.
Jones learned—and proved—a thing or two as creative director at Louis Vuitton. One of them was that he fully appreciates the sane commerciality of balancing wild things with some of the things a regular (wealthy) man would understand as suits. Another is that he absorbed and creatively responded to the savoir faire of in-house skills. Jones also realized that he could engage stacks of people whom luxury had never touched, both through his reeling in of Supreme for a collaboration, and by his personal friendships.
So this was the essence of what went on at his debut Dior show (the press notes were headed Dior, not Dior Homme). Jones threw in delightful morsels for the millennials—tiny John Galliano for Dio–era saddlebags, CD-logo stud earrings by Yoon Ahn, utility clips designer by Matthew Williams of Alyx. And there were suits, the jackets wrapped and buttoned a little off-center, with a cut named “Oblique,” a reference to a 1955 Dior couture collection.
In our time, the role of heavy hitters in the creative director class is to orchestrate shows as immersive experiences with Alessandro Michele at Gucci, and Hedi Slimane—about to debut at Céline next season—as with the resort trips taken by Chanel, by Nicolas Ghesquière on the LV women’s side, and Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior, there must be a thousand directions to look in, people to recognize, references for fashion geeks to clock, and sets to Instagram. Jones has that, in spades.