Harder still for a men’s designer like Kim Jones, because going back a few decades, the Dior reputation in menswear was simply that the house provided conventional gray suits, safe for middle-management upward. Jones, however, is 21st-century smart. He says he sees Christian Dior from the point of view of a very long-term legacy—what history will record that he contributed to the house, in the future. Which is why he saw a connection with American artist Daniel Arsham, whose practice is imagining future archaeologies—what people (if there are people by then) will make of the clues humans leave behind about our cultures and technologies centuries hence.
Jones commissioned Arsham to make an installation of giant DIOR capital letters, crumbling cement sculptures situated amid serenely surreal pink desert sand. Above the entrance to the show was a faux clock, cracked and chipped; it was a reimagined replica of the one that Arsham and Jones saw in a photograph of Christian Dior in his office in the ’50s—the very same one is there today, ticking away the minutes as all of Jones’s predecessors have come and gone.
It gave him a conceptual landscape in which to place his own rediscovery of the Dior gray men’s suit, once thought impervious to fashion and strictly separated in its 20th-century masculine gendered category, still a huge one for the brand. Jones, cleverly, has set about putting his own imprint on the business by continuing to place tailoring at its core—not going so far as to scare off the existing customer, but by incrementally transferring flourishes and techniques from the women’s couture side of the house. Last season, he unearthed the key to this Dior solution when he added a diagonal satin sash—a memory of Christian Dior’s haute couture—to the template of the male suit. It has met with success, he says: “People have been ordering them for weddings—lots of men, women too. It’s become a real business of its own.”
Harder still for a men’s designer like Kim Jones, because going back a few decades, the Dior reputation in menswear was simply that the house provided conventional gray suits, safe for middle-management upward. Jones, however, is 21st-century smart. He says he sees Christian Dior from the point of view of a very long-term legacy—what history will record that he contributed to the house, in the future. Which is why he saw a connection with American artist Daniel Arsham, whose practice is imagining future archaeologies—what people (if there are people by then) will make of the clues humans leave behind about our cultures and technologies centuries hence.
