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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DRIES VAN NOTEN SPRING 2021 MENSWEAR

Dries Van Noten is speaking with wry cheerfulness about how COVID-19 has made him rewire the design habit of a lifetime. “You know how fond I was of fashion shows? The whole collection was built up around the idea of putting it on a catwalk. But this time, it was thinking about clothes for a shoot.” With a runway out of the question, Van Noten found himself in the completely new territory of directing photographs and a film. That’s a first in a 34-year career. “Because we’ve never had an advertising campaign. We lost things, but we learned things. It’s pushing a new kind of creativity.”

Another first is the fact that Van Noten has amalgamated his women’s and men’s collections into one—a process of rationalization (cost reducing, too), which was already underway before the pandemic. When you dive into the photographs—partly shot on a breezy day on a Rotterdam beach—the design symbiosis makes total sense: board shorts, Bermudas, easy cotton jackets worn by both boys and girls. “We wanted to work around beauty [that] evokes energy—not one that makes you dream or linger on things that are past, which makes you nostalgic,” he says. “It had to push you to the future, to give energy.”

Van Noten asked the Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen to shoot the images and film. “She captures the moment in a very good way. There’s a directness and she works fast and spontaneously.” Sassen is in the Netherlands, not far from Van Noten’s Antwerp base. Creative groups banding together to make fashion imagery happen locally is becoming a super-interesting phenomenon in every country now. So when it came to making the film, the socially distanced crew moved into a studio in Amsterdam, and the models started dancing in front of what looks curiously like a ’60s-type light show, or possibly some sort of neo-rave type of thing.

In fact, the source is the very much earlier work of the New Zealand artist Len Lye, whose pioneering technique of painting on celluloid film predates psychedelia by decades. “He was such a discovery for me. He started to do this in the late ’20s, early ’30s.” Working with the Len Lye Foundation, Van Noten developed the prints that run through the collection, “psychedelic sun, sunshine and moons, light bars, and palm trees.” And quite brilliant effects they are, for a designer whose innovation must always move forward through print—the attraction for his art-conscious customers—and through pragmatism.

Tough as the times may be, Van Noten has all the elements empathetically calibrated for what people might want to look and feel like next summer. There are jackets made of “two layers of cotton [that] are foiled and slightly padded, very soft, nice to touch”; black papery cotton dresses with cutout necklines; an oversized parka printed inside and out with a new inkjet technique; lots more. Van Noten is never one to hype or overstate any situation. He might, one suspects, even have enjoyed some of the ways the creative chips are falling in the face of the 2020 emergency. “I’m quite happy,” he reflected. “The limitations are not always limitations for me anymore.”

Source: VogueRunway

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