This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of fashion month in Europe. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
The evening before this season’s Dior Men’s runway show, Kim Jones is working in a studio a stone’s throw from the Arc de Triomphe. He’s wearing two vintage Rolex Daytonas, steel and gold, over the sleeves of his knit Miu Miu polo—one on each wrist. The gold one is his “new baby.” “I travel with six,” he says.
Time is something Jones values greatly. As the creative head of two fashion houses, Dior menswear and Fendi womenswear and couture, he’s responsible for over a dozen collections in a year, and 24 hours aren’t quite enough for his massive creative responsibilities. By nature he is always moving forward. But some occasions must be marked, and Friday’s Spring-Summer 2024 show will cap his first five years at Dior. “That’s quite long these days, isn’t it?” he says.
Jones’s list of accomplishments at Dior in those five years is extensive. His tenure at the French house has coincided with a profound shift in the business and culture of men’s fashion, and he is responsible for creating some of the era’s defining moments. His 2020 collaboration between Dior and Air Jordan represented the apogee of the luxury streetwear movement, arguably the most anticipated sneaker drop in human history. His ongoing work with artists like Raymond Pettibon, Hajime Sorayama, Kenny Scharf, Amoako Boafo, and Peter Doig have brought the art and fashion worlds into conversation like never before. And he’s launched a growing list of ambitious projects that have simply made the menswear world more fun and interesting: bringing streetwear OG Shawn Stüssy out of retirement for a joint collection, tapping young designers like Eli Russell Linnetz for guest design gigs.
Dior doesn’t share sales figures, but the Jones era has clearly boomed. The menswear business, Jones says, “has grown a huge amount since I started, in terms of volume and sales, so it’s reaching a lot more people.” I note that I had just come from a fashion show that appeared heavily indebted to his output of comfortable and elegant menswear. “You know, when I'm walking down the street I see the impact,” he says. “And that’s something you never really saw before.”
(Jones’s impact could be felt in Pharrell’s Louis Vuitton debut, too, which was peppered with references to Jones’s work at LV from 2011-2018. “He’s looking at the archive, which is the best thing he can do,” says Jones of his friend. “I thought his show was really impressive, because there was a lot of workmanship in it.”)
What, I ask, is he most proud of in his first five years? “Just the fact that I feel like I fit well here,” he says. “I love couture, I love nature, and I love art, and they were the three things that were Christian Dior’s passions in life. So I feel a sort of understanding of who the man was.” A sweatshirt emblazoned with an image of the man himself hangs on a rack nearby. Though five years is indeed a long time in one design job these days, Jones is already thinking of what he’ll do at Dior years from now. “You need to switch things up after year three, year five, year seven. I’m really interested in keeping the brand growing and motivated,” he says.
Jones pulls out a board of looks to explain the current switch-up. The collection, he explains, is “really about the clothes.” (Which may sound trite, but many menswear collections this week have not been concerned with craftsmanship or real clothes people are expected to wear.) Jones has removed any distraction from technique and silhouette. There are no splashy collaborations for the big anniversary.
Instead Jones has introduced what you might call—at risk of slight overstatement—his own New Look. For five years Jones popularized fully-cut, languid trousers, of the kind that now pool around the sneakers of just about every menswear-obsessed man on the planet. In the arena of pants, perhaps menswear’s most important, Jones is a heavyweight of influence. And now, the first six models in the lineup are wearing simple, dignified blazers over aggressively cropped trousers.
“I was looking at the idea of couture length in the twenties, at the dresses, but then making it as a trouser,” he explains. “So it’s a new proportion for men.” In menswear, a couple inches of tailoring can make all the difference, and after seeing so many giant pants in the last few weeks, the effect of these high waters on the eye is striking—and will surely pull the hemlines of men’s pants toward the sky in seasons to come. (“I see it everywhere, now. But it’s a compliment,” Jones says of his references and silhouettes in other collections.)
Jones also looked at the 1959 collections Yves Saint Laurent designed for Dior, which informed a series of elegant coats in rich cannage embroidery. “You understand the silhouette when you see it from the side,” he says, pulling out an image of a model in profile wearing a gracefully sweeping coat over simple sandals, a bright orange couture beanie atop his head. “When I see it like that, I die,” Jones says. The hats, and a sequence of vibrant polo shirts—a welcome change from the beiges and browns of his almost elegiac fall collection—bring to Jones’s mind Christian Dior’s famous garden. “I thought it was nice to have the colors for summer,” he said.
For the first time, Jones collaged together the work of several of his predecessors in the same line. Fashion geeks on TikTok will no doubt enjoy decoding every last reference, but here’s a start: sumptuous metallic embroideries on blazers and vests recall the Gianfranco Ferré era, with soft textures influenced by Marc Bohan. Leopard print, a callout to Dior’s watershed 1947 collection, appears in short shorts and a sporty vest. “It’s a little punk-y, a little New Wave,” Jones says of the leopard looks. “New Look, New Wave.” John Galliano’s Dior Saddle Bag, which Jones revived as a major men’s status symbol, has been rethought with a smoother, simpler profile and a new quick-release lock. “The bag has been a hit ever since I joined Dior, and we needed to refresh it,” Jones says. “You don’t kill things if they work, but you also know the things that have a lifespan.”
A minor commotion breaks out in the studio as two of Dior’s newest ambassadors, Thai actors Apo and Mile, arrive to meet Jones. “You’re on my Instagram feed all the time, I feel like I know you really well,” he says as the young men, covered in shiny new Dior gear, grin ear-to-ear. A camera crew hovers nearby—Jones’s day is hurtling forward as the clock ticks. On my way out, I ask him what he hopes to accomplish in the next five years at Dior. “I don’t know,” Jones says. “I don’t have time to think about it—I just go.”
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