The calm, statue-like exactitude hits you first: the stone-colored smoothness of the wrap-over jacket; light and shadow throwing the perfectly-curved pleats of a trouser into relief. Scroll on. Soon it’s very clear we’re looking at a gallery of what Kim Jones has set in stone for Dior Men over five years—and beyond that, a summary of the ideas he’s carved out for menswear over his whole career.
In plain language, that’s the sense of everyday dressing Jones has brought to fashion—how he’s simultaneously casualized formal wear and formalized casual wear for men who buy clothes at a luxury level. Or as he puts it, “ The blurring of formal and informal.” This season’s spin—via press release—revolves around Jones’s fascination with New York style in the 1970s and ’80s. “That collision of uptown and downtown, preppy and cool, something reflected in fashion, film, the art world, and photography during that time.”
You don’t really need to know that, because without the bells and whistles of a runway show, this summer pre-collection has the easy-seeming clarity Jones has calibrated so very precisely over time. There’s the indelible stamp of that wrapped jacket he’s evolved for Dior since the terrific fall 2019 collection he sent out along a moving walkway. The use of the Dior ‘cannage’ pattern as quilting on a bomber jacket. The lightweight layering of trench coats, untucked shirting, the odd sporty nod to a baseball and polo shirt. A knitted tie tossed in as a retro-novel styling point.
Persuading people to part with money for luxury clothes is tougher than it’s been for years. Jones’s de-cluttered, rational, and multi-generational offering is a smart pitch for that kind of investment in pieces rather than fleeting trends. The press release leaned on that: “Eschewing an idea of throwaway fashion, both the quality of fabrications and the timelessness of design reflect a sense of inheritance. A notion of something to be passed along, of “future archive.”