Kim Jones on Five Years at Dior, and His “New Look” for Pants
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.
Courtesy of Dior Courtesy of Dior
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.
Source: GQ
