Designer Kim Jones synthesizes the contemporary zeitgeist with Christian Dior’s venerable legacy to revive the golden age of fashion.
By HASSAN AL-SALEH
Photography MARK LEBON & HUGO SCOTT
British-born designer, art collector and voracious international explorer Kim Jones is one of the most influential figures reshaping modern menswear. Always on the cutting edge, he is a formidable force to be reckoned with not only because of his boundless creativity, but because of his innate ability to tap into the zeitgeist with a profound understanding of the business of fashion.
After a seven-year tenure at Louis Vuitton that reimagined the brand into a major global menswear player and set the benchmark for cross-genre brand collaborations, Jones was appointed to creatively helm Dior Men in 2018. Since then, his deft approach at Dior that mines the illustrious heritage of the house and reinterprets the couturier’s signature design codes - like the Bar Suit for men - has imbued the brand with a renewed sense of relevance, vitality, modernity and desirability. One that harks back to the renaissance of couture with a modern vernacular of a global cultural vision that transcends fashion and style.
While Jones is heralded as a contemporary fashion innovator and one of the world’s most prescient designers of our time for catapulting streetwear into the luxury stratosphere, reinvigorating tailoring and engineering legendary collaborations, one thing he makes very clear is that at Dior, Mr. Christian Dior is and always will be the protagonist.
“I’m interested in what’s happening in modern culture. I’m much more into culture than fashion in terms of the way things reach people, how people like to look at stuff. For me, that’s interesting. Fashion’s really great and I love working with it, but I think nowadays you need a bit more than that. That’s something I look at. I look at people from all over the world.”