DIOR MEN Pre-Fall 2021 Menswear

This time last December, Kim Jones’s many fans across the fashion and art worlds were gathered in Miami Beach. His Dior Men show was a Basel-adjacent affair, complete with a walk-through of the new Rubell Museum. The pandemic scuttled plans to stage a show in Beijing for Jones’s latest outing—there was a livestreamed video and a screening party at the city’s Phoenix International Media Center instead—but in every other way, this collection is just as ambitious as that pre-COVID occasion.

The coronavirus crisis shuttered businesses across New York City this year. Still, even on the quietest days of the summer, there was a line outside SoHo’s Dior Men store. Jones has a phenomenon on his hands; there are similar lines in Los Angeles and other cities. “People like to feel part of a gang, only now because of social media it is much more global,” he said on a Zoom call. These off-season collections feed that global excitement.

Last year, Jones revealed a colorful collaboration with Shawn Stussy, the streetwear OG. This season, he tapped Kenny Scharf, an American artist who emerged from the 1980s East Village scene, making street art alongside his friends Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. “The fun and the energy of that time—you see young kids being excited by Kenny Scharf’s work. It’s speaking across generations,” Jones said.

Scharf’s canvases can now fetch up to six figures, but he still has street cred: Via “Karbombz,” a public art project, he’s tagged upwards of 300 cars with his imaginary creatures—all for free. Together, the designer and the artist selected contemporary pieces and older ones to reproduce, including When the Worlds Collide, a 1984 canvas in the Whitney’s permanent collection. Scharf also designed 12 Chinese zodiac signs for the show’s knits and underpinnings, and, of course, he had free rein to reinterpret the Dior logo.

“I just wanted it to be a very full-on version, using specific techniques to recreate his work in really beautiful ways, to make it even more Pop,” Jones said. In some cases, the Dior ateliers were joined by Chinese artisans who rendered Scharf paintings in delicate seed embroideries. Silhouette-wise, Jones’s instinct was to soften his distinctive tailoring and give it a more lounge-y attitude. Jackets are belted like robes and pants are easy; some of the models wear Oblique-patterned slippers. We are still locked in, after all.

Answering needs or triggering desire, Jones erases distinctions between high and low, and his roving eye sees heroes in all places. This season he invited the DJ Honey Dijon to the party, and she enlisted Lady Miss Kier to record a Dior-ified rendition of Deee-Lite’s megahit “What Is Love?” The intergalactic vibe of the runway video was partly inspired by Jones’s interest in The Mandalorian. “I thought it was fun to bring all these things together in a time when it’s quite negative, and to have a bit of optimism,” he said.

Scharf, whose first show was at New York’s Fiorucci boutique in 1979 and earliest fashion hookup was with Stephen Sprouse, is the perfect Jones collaborator. His work gleefully obliterates boundaries too. “I’m one of the inventors of all that,” Scharf said on a call from his L.A. studio. He raved about Jones: “He’s a listener, he’s a learner, and that shows. He went really deep into what I’m doing.” Those lines outside Greene Street seem only bound to grow.

Source: VogueRunway/Nicole Phelps

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DIOR MEN SPRING 2021

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The electric acclaim Kim Jones has brought to Dior Men since he took the reins in 2018 has centered on the buzzy atmosphere of large-scale runway shows—six of them, already, in two years. Needless to say, with runway congregations ruled out, everything’s very different in the summer of 2020, but that didn’t prevent today’s collaboration between Jones and the 36-year-old Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo, whose stunning huge-scale portraits of Black subjects—partly richly finger-painted—have a skyrocketing reputation in the contemporary art world. “It’s a portrait of an artist who I greatly admire,” Jones said. “[The gallerist] Mera Rubell introduced me to Amoako last year in Miami. I really loved his work and wanted to work with him because of my own links to Africa. He lives between Vienna, where he studied, Ghana, and Chicago. So we sat down and discussed.”

The first results—a collection fusing Boafo’s art with Dior artisanship, a look book, and a documentary film shot at the artist’s studio in Accra and at Jones’ home in London—are launched in a more intimate, in-depth, and, dare we say, intelligent way than could possibly have come across in front of the usual roar of the crowd and show hustle of the Paris collections. One of the unexpected upsides of the enforced break from fashion-as-usual is watching how communication is suddenly transitioning from image to information—from silent screen to talkies. That’s a breakthrough.

So, here we were at 2:30 p.m. for the worldwide laptop Dior Men premiere, watching and hearing Boafo in his studio in Ghana as he paints and describes how he captures friends and family, “and people who create spaces for others to exist.” He speaks about the flat colors he uses to silhouette his figures, and, he explains, “how fashion inspires my work. I tend to look at characters who have that sense of style.” Friends hanging at Boafo’s place are wearing pieces from the collection, and the artist is working in a faded-wallpaper print Dior Men shirt, whose pattern has bounced back in a creative arc from portrait to garment.

The collection is smaller and more edited than it would have been. Jones was working out of his Notting Hill house with a small team and long distance with Dior ateliers in France to get it done over the past months. The result: clothes saturated with uplifting color and print, which pinpoint Boafo’s signatures within the language the designer has established for Dior Men. Later in the video Jones is interviewed on camera in his home studio, speaking about how a visual connection gelled when he saw Boafo’s portrait of a boy in a green beret and a ivy-print shirt: “Ivy was one of Monsieur Dior’s symbols.”

Celebrating and platforming Boafo’s work for a luxury fashion market meant, among other things, transferring the tactile energy of his finger-painted heads into two intensely embroidered sweaters. The pattern from a semi-sheer fil coupé jacquard shirt sprang from a close-up Jones had taken of Boafo’s brush work. He also lifted subtle inspiration from haute couture—the gray taffeta blouson being a renewed, more youthful and summery iteration of the opera coat which opened his last show.

Still, even without the Black Lives Matter uprising which is fundamentally changing the way all institutions are being interrogated now, a collaboration like this was always going to demand detailed explanation. This one is tooled differently from the usual artist-brand collab. Behind it is an exchange with Dior which was stipulated by Boafo. “He said he didn’t want a royalty [for himself], but help to build a foundation for young artists in Accra,” Jones said. A donation made by Christian Dior (the sum was not specified) backs up Boafo’s activism. In using the leverage of his market power to lift up African art and artists, he is one of the new generation of Black artists (Virgil Abloh and Stormzy being two others) who believe in the transformative empowerment of cultural education. In May, Boafo raised $190,000 (three times the estimate) with an online auction of his painting, Aurore Iradukunda, to benefit the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.

The initiative will consist of a building that will host Boafo’s studio, a residence, and an artist-run gallery, supporting young artists in Ghana and their studio practice. “The change needed right now is to support young people through college and training to give everyone equal opportunities,” Jones said. The focus of this project is close to his heart, and, he says, to part of his own upbringing as the son of a hydrogeologist who worked throughout the continent. “We moved to Ethiopia when I was around three years old, spent time living there, and then moved around east Africa and then Botswana. I’ve kept going back for the rest of my life.”

Underlying his motivation—using Dior’s fashion broadcasting capabilities to enlighten a broad audience about the vitality of contemporary African art, as well as facilitating a project with cash—is a quieter salute to Jones’s father, who recently passed away. “The fact that we are working with Amoako Boafo, from Ghana, which was one of my father’s favorite African countries is,” he said, “a fitting tribute to the man who introduced me to Africa and the world.”

Source: VogueRunway

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Kim Jones Confirmed at Dior Homme as Kris Van Assche Exits

After 11 years in at the helm, Kris Van Assche has announced that he will be leaving his position as artistic director of Dior Homme. The news comes as a surprise, with the Belgian designer having given no indication of plans to move on from the role in recent months.

"I am deeply honored to join the house of Dior, a symbol of the ultimate elegance,” said Jones. “I would like to warmly thank Bernard Arnault and Pietro Beccari for their trust in giving me this incredible opportunity. I am committed to create a modern and innovative male silhouette built upon the unique legacy of the house.”

"After 11 years at Dior Homme, my mind and heart filled with experiences, I am leaving this beautiful house to pursue new challenges," said Van Assche. "I wish to thank Bernard Arnault for the trust he placed in me, Sidney Toledano and Serge Brunschwig for their warm welcome at Dior and their continuous support during all those years."

Known for his urban, minimalistic aesthetic, Van Assche trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, before moving to Paris to work at Yves Saint Laurent under Hedi Slimane. He followed Slimane to Dior Homme in 2000 but left in 2004 to start his own menswear label, which was well-received and garnered much attention from the industry at large. In 2007, when Hedi Slimane departed Dior Homme, Van Assche succeeded his former mentor at the creative helm. Van Assche’s label was closed when he last renewed his contract at Dior Homme in 2015.

Source: Hypbeast; Business of Fashion

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