Kim Jones has used his Dior Men runways so far to celebrate tailoring, lending the house’s menswear some of the pomp and circumstance of the haute couture—a voluptuous satin sash here, a diamond-look brooch there. In just a year he’s carved a fabulous signature and played no small part in electrifying the Paris menswear scene in the process.
Clicking through this pre-collection is a chance to see Jones working in a more minor key and establishing what the Dior Men off-duty vibe looks like. There are elements of street and of sport, both of which are de rigueur at brands even in the highest price bracket. But in these categories too, he’s making use of the house patrimony. Christian Dior was a lover of nature; his garden in the Normandy village of Granville remains a popular tourist destination. He was also knowledgeable about art, having run a gallery before launching his couture label in 1946.
Jones brought Monsieur Dior’s two passions together cleverly via one of fashion’s 21st-century preoccupations, a collaboration. The British artist Alex Foxton, who recently had his first solo exhibition at Paris’s Galerie Derouillon and also happens to work in the Dior Men studio, created flower paintings in a pastel palette lifted from his own recent work, which became prints used on camp shirts, blousons, jean jackets, and trenches, as well as an overlay motif on logo bags and accessories. Femme fleurs, meet homme fleurs.
The collection also includes a selection of single side-buttoning suits that take their cues from Jones’s runway offering. Though they’re more approachable and everyday, they remain powerfully identifiable: a real accomplishment in the shifting, but still startlingly homogenous world of menswear.
