Watch to discover how the Dior Winter 2019-2020 men’s collection by Kim Jones is being presented as a series of tableaux vivants along a vast, 76-meter moving walkway, like a couture salon showing of times past but on an operatic scale.
Our Paris show space, atmospheric in its low-lit emptiness, won’t be like this for long. With an expectant fashion crowd set to descend any second to witness the unveiling of the Dior Winter 2019-2020 men’s collection by Kim Jones.
Clean, sleek lines at this evening’s Dior Men’s show
Special guests were there like Supermodel Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. Attending the Dior Winter 2019-2020 men’s show, actor and House muse Robert Pattinson arrived bundled up for the January weather in a couture-inspired, double-face coat from the just-released collection by Kim Jones.
Tailoring is, of course, the subject du jour in menswear, but how to place a suit in a context that both honors tradition and convinces a new generation is another matter. Jones cracked the conundrum by bringing together the gendered sides of the capabilities that reside under the roof of this house—the Dior uniform of the corporate businessman and politician’s suit, and the draping in 3-d that is the expertise of the women’s haute couture.
Jones is skilled at layering his references, and tethering them back to French culture. Take the sportswear structures of vests and utilitarian workwear that appeared throughout. The heavily-beaded vest with what looked like a cat’s face—what Jones called a “tactical jacket”—turned out not to have been inspired by the Gilets Jaunes, or footage of police countering them. Actually, he’d been looking at the statues to French heroes and statesmen in parks and buildings around Paris. “I noticed how many of them are wearing armor.”
That might have triggered the more perverse-looking bits and pieces: the leather gauntlets gone S&M, the harnessing, the saddle-bag made in black nylon. Or was that a soupcon of Helmut Lang in the ’90s?
But references, references—anyone can have references! The point of the exercise is to get to the place where it’s all funneled into a newly relevant, on-point aesthetic. This collection, shown on its lanky, long-haired beautiful androgynes projected a classy louche minimalism we haven’t quite seen before. It felt like an almost historic turning of a page.
Dior Men Summer 2019 show. Discover it: @dior.
