Intelligence
Finally, some verve. Newly anointed menswear
creative directors, ranging from the hyper-cyber-
connected to the cerebrally charged, have brought
a fresh virile energy to the field. There is new
leadership at the men’s lines of Louis Vuitton and
Dior: one designer has no formal fashion education
but is armed with a robust online fanbase and
his own influential lifestyle brand; the other has
nurtured collaboration and craftsmanship for more
than a decade. Plus, there’s the young Frenchman
who has added butch menswear to his eponymous
line and debuted it on a beach in Marseille.Action
men
Three design chiefs marshalling a fresh
assault on menswear’s old orderalso dropping the ‘Homme’ from the menswear
branding. Taking a vivid approach and tapping couture
techniques, he draws on the floral patterns of Christian
Dior’s personal porcelain (kept in his sugary pink
childhood home in Normandy) and reinterprets them
in feather appliqué by Maison Lemarié. The dove-grey
toile de Jouy chosen by interior designer Victor
Grandpierre for Dior’s original 30 Avenue Montaigne
boutique in 1947 is resurrected as a print, while US
artist Kaws reinterprets the brand’s classic bee motif.
Jones is connected to the millennial moment yet
committed to craftsmanship, creating Galliano-era logo
lace vests and monogram high-tops worn with wrap-
around tailored jackets influenced by the forms of the
1950 couture collection. In the early Noughties, Jones
was the pioneer of a sharp streetwear sensibility that’s
still shaping menswear today; with Dior’s new dialled-
down ease, he’s taking it somewhere new.
dior.comDIOR
London-born Jones spent seven years at Louis Vuitton
developing a smart, sports-luxe attitude for the
brand’s menswear with an ethnographic approach to
storytelling. Inspired by his childhood in Africa, he
translated the energy and excitement of travel into
elegant, cool clothes. In his hands, the finest cashmeres,
leathers and silks became more relaxed than rarefied,
while the LV monogram was sprinkled across the
collections in subtle, clever ways. Jones infused his fluid,
sporty tailoring with pop-culture panache, most notably
with his Louis Vuitton x Supreme capsule collection,
which changed the face of merchandising forever and
instigated the shift towards ‘It’ sneakers.
His arrival at Dior marks a new mood for its
menswear, which had been under the direction of
Kris Van Assche for more than a decade. Van Assche
favoured a darker, leaner silhouette – a tone set by
Hedi Slimane at the turn of the new millennium. Jones
has wasted no time in lightening the gothic mood, while
JONES’ S/S19 COLLECTION
FEATURED STRIPED JACKETS
AND LOOSE SILHOUETTESILLUSTRATOR: MAGDA ANTONIUK WRITER: DAL CHODHA
KIM JONES
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