Kim Jones’s first step into the new decade at Dior Men was a heralding vision: a swirling pearl-gray moiré taffeta swing coat with a crushed rosette at the collar, worn with a pale turtleneck and narrow pinstriped trousers. He had one white velvet opera-gloved hand nonchalantly stuck into his pocket and wore a pearl earring. Had the music not drowned it out, the audience might have been heard exhaling a sigh of excitement. Contentment, even.
What if the 2020s are a time when it becomes completely anachronistic to think of clothes and fabrics being assigned by gender? There’s a creative generation now in power at the very top of fashion that sees none of those old boundaries. Jones is a leader in that cohort. He’s in charge of menswear at Dior, but he delved into the house archive of ’50s haute couture—studying the silhouettes and embroideries—and came up with a superbly elegant collection.
From the couture, cuts of coats and spectacular embroideries were transposed, tweaked, and made relevant in a classic menswear palette of beige, gray, brown, and navy. It was the attitude, the casual confidence in owning an opulent swagger that cut through. Sleeves pushed up and sweaters half-tucked, these chisel-cheekboned boys looked as if they’d inherited the theory of every point of style from their grandmothers and their grandfathers, but then forgot about them, and carved something new for themselves.
Every liberation movement is a long time in coming. The other thread in this show is that it was an homage to the late jewelry designer and stylist Judy Blame, who died two years ago. Blame was a transformer of found objects into pins and necklaces, a central figure in the London club/fashion/music/magazine scene of the ’80s. His generation—along with the likes of Boy George and Leigh Bowery, and all the denizens of the London clubs—were the first gender-benders, who paved the way for the breakthroughs of the LGBTQ+ culture of today.
Stephen Jones, a contemporary of that time, and an established millinery collaborator with Dior, joined Jones to make flat caps zippered across the brims and in festooning the collection with homages to Blame’s DIY jewelry. Jones became a fan and close friend of Blame’s. The emotion he felt on his passing was laced through this collection—the “Toile de Judy” spin Jones put on the Dior classic fabric; the references to the Buffalo scene with the photographer Ray Petri, lionizing male working class beauty—all this came so confidently into play in so many registers throughout this show.
Jones is at his very best when he amalgamates feeling into elegance, dissolving barriers between classes and categories. In this show, he orchestrated something that looked amazingly expert and yet easy and inevitable at the same time. The ceremonial-modern diagonal sashes of his suits, invented two seasons ago, evolved into simplified, folded coat lapels. A silver-metal feather embroidered coat, inspired by a piece in the Christian Dior haute couture archive, shone unforgettably at the finale. If it felt like the honoring of the energy of a lost friend, it also pointed to a future that has only just begun.
