Kim Jones has been turning to his extensive collection of rare books once again. He brought in Robert Pattinson and Gwendoline Christie to recite The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot’s epically difficult, melancholic poem written in the aftermath of World War I. Jones owns six copies of this work of English literature which is considered to be pivotal to the modernism of exactly a century ago; so there were the faces of Pattinson and Christie, filmed by Baillie Walsh, and blown up on massive screens as the models walked past.
All that’s just to fill in the background. What Jones took from the meaning of this most British of works, the school exam subject which has tortured the brains of generations of teenagers, was to do with its themes of time passing, death and renewal. “For me, I read it as about renewal and change; times changing,” he said before the show. “So it begins with Christian Dior dying, and then Yves Saint Laurent coming in and suddenly doing new things. And there’s a lot of me in it.”
To parse the fashion stanzas: there were pale, neutral colors, a looseness and fluidity, layerings of transparent trails streaming from the backs of trousers (a trend, oddly, that’s been turning up in several shows). There was a moment for jackets and sweaters embroidered with tiny chains of abstracted lily of the valley, the early spring flower-favorite of Christian Dior. Then, as Christie and Pattinson spoke Eliot’s passages on death by drowning, there were conceptual life jackets with tonally matched buoyancy pads, riffs on seafarer’s Aran knits, voluminous A-line storm coats, takes on yellow seafaring oilskin raincoats, and sou’westers.
The references to Saint Laurent’s time at Dior—it was fleeting, in 1958—were anchored in Jones’s study of the gray over-the-head wool tunic he made; itself a revolutionary reference to fisherman’s traditional workwear, but transgressively (for the time) upgraded to haute couture. Jones said he’d also examined the young Yves’s penchant for animal print (there was a faux leopard lining visible in a slash-sided trench coat), and how he created volumes with vents in his raincoats.
It was more of a flavor, perhaps a nod to fashion history geeks (both old and young—competitive discussion of references is very much becoming a TikTok and Instagram video thing) rather than any straight-up replication of past looks. As for the ‘Me’ element Jones spoke about, that was surely in the evolution of the distinctively tailored suit that is his alone—the minimal, lapel-less single-breasted jacket over flowing trousers. It has both a captivating sensitivity and an elegance about it.
Over the long run, Jones has been a pioneer in bringing street references into high fashion, and then insisting on applying Christian Dior’s women’s templates to menswear. As times move on, it’s a measure of Jones’s influence that the skirts—and shorts so wide that they look like skirts—in this show now pass as quite normal. He’s working in 2023, not 1923, like T.S. Eliot. English academics the world over might be aghast at Eliot’s poetry being used in a fashion show, but the two Britishers at least have this in common: being out to change the discipline they work in, mediating between history and the future.
