Whatever the chosen medium, designers commonly seek inspiration from other universes to craft new ideas. Rarely would they ever look at their own, unless one is Dior Men’s artistic director Kim Jones who, unlike his peers in the industry, has spent the last five years telling stories that have the entirety of the houses’ history entwined throughout.
His process never breaks tradition, opting to control a majority of his work with technicalities that were once reserved for its Haute Couture arm, which, to this day, is still fixated on dressing only women. Addicted to the adrenaline of such benevolent interactions between the houses’ departments, Summer ’24, in part a celebration of his fifth anniversary and an ode to the many eras that existed in its spaces reflects a movement that Jones was responsible for igniting when he first started at Dior Men, one that has transformed the landscape of menswear into another that speaks an intimate language of detailed embroidery and feminine silhouettes as evolutionary cues.
“Dior is a Haute Couture brand,” mentions Jones. “At the heart of Dior is silhouette, shape, technique and fabrication of the very highest order.” Just as Monsieur Christian Dior birthed the creation of the New Look for women in the 1950s by way of cinched waists and exaggerated shoulders, the latest collection lays the brickwork to the formation of the New Look for men — and it comes in the form of imbuing couture techniques into ready-to-wear pieces.
Hidden within (and above) the silhouettes drafted from the archives of Yves Saint Laurent’s minimalistic era are surrealist details and textures that call back to Gianfranco Ferré and Marc Bohan’s times at Dior. With the help of the atelier’s experience, some even witnessing more than five changes in guards at the house, modest menswear archetypes such as crew neck sweaters, polo shirts, and Harrington jackets come detailed with the house’s tweed, embroideries and Cannage in Summer 2024. On hue-accentuated pieces, the straightforward addition of hand-woven rhinestones showcases this perfectly, even as it may look ordinary from afar. And ideas as far strung as squeezing the male body in couture silhouettes is how one can create splendrous fashion without ever having to look any further, just deeper.
