Kim Jones was planning on unveiling his Dior Men pre-fall collection in Hong Kong on March 23. The show was going to follow the model of the house’s runway spectacle in Egypt in December of 2022 until it was postponed indefinitely last month. Jones is presenting the collection via this lookbook instead.
“Elegance” and “effortlessness” are key words to understanding Jones’s most recent collections at Dior Men. Right out of the gate, but particularly in his most recent fall lineup, Jones concocted a softer take on sophisticated menswear. At the center of this vision was, and still is, his suiting. This pre-fall lineup is “about simplicity and sophistication through ease,” Jones said, evoking ideas of fluidity and loucheness, and “the pleasure of dressing.”
Jones name-checked the legacies of Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent in his notes, harkening back to fluid suitings created with decisive yet forgiving cuts that outlined the body and helped define elegance in the second half of the 20th century. In this collection, Jones also expanded on the couture fabrications he introduced for fall, where he referenced Monsieur Dior’s 1950 “Debussy” gown, by extrapolating the striped embroidery from the house’s 1952 “Pépite” dress and Saint Laurent’s floral embroidery of 1958 and applying them to alluring shirting.
Here, Jones applied tie fastenings—taken from Saint Laurent’s “Trapèze” collection—and applied them to shirts in lieu of plackets and onto relaxed interpretations of the vest. These fabrications yielded Jones’s first true iteration of the three-piece suit at Dior, yet the silhouette is more evocative of an easy robe over an easy shirt than a constricting #menswear three-piece. They emphasize Jones’s take on contemporary menswear elegance, which softens the man rather than armor him.
Elsewhere, Jones created a pretty magnificent floating shawl lapel effect on his slouchy overcoats and jackets, and layered organza under wide-legged shorts in a playful yet compelling reference to the ballgowns his predecessors offered at the Dior salons. With Capote’s swans the talk of the moment, ideas of mid-century style have resurfaced. These are almost exclusively applied to womenswear, with luxury menswear reduced to their companion, but not for Jones.
Indeed, what’s most compelling about Jones’s reinterpretation of mid-century glamour is to see what this primness looks like in the context of contemporary menswear. At Dior Men today, sartorial sophistication is equal parts elegance and pragmatism, opulence and utility. Attached to classicality yet detached from traditional masculinity. It’s quite exciting to see it unfold.
