Harder still for a menās 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 legacyāwhat 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 archaeologiesāwhat 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 ā50sāthe very same one is there today, ticking away the minutes as all of Jonesās predecessors have come and gone.
It gave him a conceptual landscape in which to place his own rediscovery of the Dior gray menās 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 coreānot going so far as to scare off the existing customer, but by incrementally transferring flourishes and techniques from the womenās couture side of the house. Last season, he unearthed the key to this Dior solution when he added a diagonal satin sashāa memory of Christian Diorās haute coutureāto the template of the male suit. It has met with success, he says: āPeople have been ordering them for weddingsālots of men, women too. Itās become a real business of its own.ā