“I want to do lightness because for me, couture always seems quite staid and heavy,” Kim Jones said regarding his Fendi spring-summer 2023 couture offering. “I wanted a floatiness. Elegant but youthful.” Jones also added that this collection was “a continuation” of his autumn couture, and a response to Fendi clients’ requests for evening dresses. What he offered was a discreetly modernized redefinion of statuesque goddess-dressing: slim silhouettes, in pale evanescent colors, 1930s style. You could barely tell that some of the silvered dresses which had overlaid printed lace-patterns, a bit like tablecloths, were leather, decorated with scanned-in prints. Or the glinting “chain-mail” gloves. “I wanted to really work with the couture techniques,” Jones said. “What they can do now is so advanced.” The concept of the swoops and drapery lightly referenced an archival Karl Lagerfeld for Fendi silk dress that Jones had studied; a glancing echo of the classical staturary of Rome, of course. Jones layered it over delicate constructs of lace-edged silk bras and slips. It’s all very pretty. But while Jones’s work blooms and evolves at Dior Men, his Fendi’s womenswear feels too reserved and steeped in comfort zone.
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The autumn-winter 2023 collection is Kim Jones‘ best line-up for Dior Men, hands down. It felt like an eureka moment, a direction for the designer to take with the brand. The new season sees a change of spirit and style, with Jones presenting an absolute understanding of sophisticated menswear that can be both unexpected and easy, refined and relevant. Inspiration-wise, the British designer returned to his extensive collection of rare books once again. He brought in Robert Pattinson and Gwendoline Christie to recite The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot’s epically difficult, melancholic poem written in the aftermath of World War I. Jones owns six copies of this work of English literature which is considered to be pivotal to the modernism of exactly a century ago; so there were the faces of Pattinson and Christie, filmed by Baillie Walsh, and blown up on massive screens as the models walked past. All that’s just to fill in the background. What Jones took from the meaning of this most British of works was to do with its themes of time passing, death and renewal. “For me, I read it as about renewal and change; times changing,” he said before the show. “So it begins with Christian Dior dying, and then Yves Saint Laurent coming in and suddenly doing new things. And there’s a lot of me in it.” To parse the fashion stanzas: there were pale, neutral colors, a looseness and fluidity, layerings of transparent trails streaming from the backs of trousers. There was a moment for jackets and sweaters embroidered with tiny chains of abstracted lily of the valley, the early spring flower-favorite of Christian Dior. Then, as Christie and Pattinson spoke Eliot’s passages on death by drowning, there were conceptual life jackets with tonally matched buoyancy pads, riffs on seafarer’s Aran knits, voluminous A-line storm coats, takes on yellow seafaring oilskin raincoats, and sou’westers. Over the long run, Jones has been a pioneer in bringing street references into high fashion, and then insisting on applying Christian Dior’s women’s templates to menswear. As times move on, it’s a measure of Jones’s influence that the skirts – and shorts so wide that they look like skirts – in this show now pass as quite normal. He’s working in 2023, not 1923, like T.S. Eliot. English academics the world over might be aghast at Eliot’s poetry being used in a fashion show, but the two Britishers at least have this in common: being out to change the discipline they work in, mediating between history and the future.
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This was a pretty good Dior Men collection that would do just fine in a studio-shot look-book or a chic, dove-grey Parisian venue. Why Kim Jones took the collection to Egypt? Well, that’s a secret of the Sphinx. During the show, in the middle-distance, a long line of men began to trek over a desert bluff, with the Great Pyramid of Giza as their backdrop. The desert wind cooperated by whipping up their pale, trailing chiffon scarves, asymmetrical capes, and half-kilts as they marched up the incline. Clad in clothes which felt coolly, elegantly avant-garde, sensibly utilitarian, each model embodied Kim Jones’s multiply-coded, yet highly salable method of menswear design for Dior Men. But the collection had pretty much no context related to the Egyptian culture and heritage. Moreover, it felt as if the pyramids became a decontextualized setting. Jones chose to sidestep any obvious references to Pharoahs or Egyptian archaeology. Instead, he was talking about how he was looking upwards to the sky for various star-related references. “Really, I was looking at two things. The ancient Egyptians were obsessed by astronomy, and Monsieur Dior was obsessed by stars and astrology. And,” he added, “when I go into the desert, I look at the sky.” That’s a very odd parallel, but OK. From there, he’d stirred in elements of retro-futurism and up-to-date science interests into a kind of ‘elevation’ of his own. “I’ve always loved Dune, which was really the first of sci-fi. And we’ve worked with NASA on some of the more technical prints.” There were desert boots with 3-D printed foot-guards that looked as if they’d manifested from a computer game. A couple of multimedia helmets with tinted visors looked as if they’d been constructed with future Space X travel to Mars in mind. All the leggings he showed might theoretically complete the kit. The designer has been intent on infusing his menswear with ideas from Dior’s women’s archive for a good while now. There’s an obvious transfer from Dior’s famous petalled ballgown ‘Junon’ into a couple of beaded-edge embroidered vests. Less obvious, but very chic, are all of Jones’s transferences from Dior’s signature gray tailoring. All the gray half-kilts he showed are bias-cut, worn over narrow tailored trousers. The collection didn’t risk any cultural appropriation controversy, clothes-wise. But with such stunning and monumental location, it felt like a missed chance for a truly inventive dialogue that could involve local artists and craftsmen.
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With Kim Jones‘ Fendi, there are ups and downs. The resort 2023 fashion show, which opened New York Fashion Week and celebrated Baguette’s anniversary, was a high. The spring-summer 2023 collection which opened Milan Fashion Week wasn’t entirely bad, but it was… mediocre. One might easily mistake it with a brand like Max Mara or Sportmax. And Fendi isn’t really a brand that fits this profile, lifestyle-wise. The collection’s shots of color, in green and blue and fiery red, were, as Jones said, purposefully projected across a clothes-scape of the neutrals that are key to the Fendi identity in order to generate new freshness to the jolt of recognition. The double-F logo first drafted by Karl Lagerfeld in 2000 was used all over the line-up. Its graphic geometric severity contrasted with the silhouetted botanical relief that Jones said had featured in a ’96-vintage Lagerfeld outing for the house. This featured on pieces including a laser-sliced leather vest and sheer, organza, Fendi-brown racerback dresses and tops. Obi-belt detailing and the inverted masculine tailoring were respectively nods back to the most recent Jones for Fendi Couture collection, and then autumn before that. Explaining this, Jones unpacked part of the process that will allow him to produce 11 collections this year (he thinks) and probably 12 collections next year. He said: “I program it so that if you put fall and then Couture and then this in a row the brand makes sense. And then there will be another to build upon it after this.” Noting that Jones also does four collections a year at Dior Man (plus all the creative direction), this entire statement sounds, well, terrifying.
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Fendi got the New York Fashion Week rolling with a bang. For over a month, the Italian brand has been communicating that it’s planning to hit the Big Apple for a big occasion: the Baguette’s 25th birthday. And what made the eternal it-bag so in-demand for the last two decades? Of course, Sex & The City, the most New York show of all the New York shows. “It was almost like a character,” Kim Jones said. “So I thought let’s do the show here, and let’s add in a few curveballs as we always do.” Sarah Jessica Parker, who sat front row with Kate Moss, Kim Kardashian and Lily Allen, approved the project as the IRL Carrie Bradshaw. She was definitely making a mind-list of her favourite looks for the second season of And Just Like That. That Jones is a prodigious collaborator has been well documented, but the match-ups he orchestrated for the celebratory resort 2023 collection were particularly inspired. Tiffany & Co. was brought in to provide the baguettes – as in diamond baguettes. The double-F logo on the Tiffany blue croc Baguette carried by Bella Hadid was pavéd in the precious stones, and the electric colour of her silk jumpsuit was 100% Tiffany blue.
Another quintessential New York addition: the Marc Jacobs collaboration. Jacobs’s section riffed on his recent collections with block letter intarsias spelling out FendiRoma rather than his own logo on everything from tracksuits and trucker jackets and matching jeans to an oversize terry robe. The faux fur XXL hats, which we’ve seen the last time on his autumn-winter 2012 runway, wowed the audience just like they did a decade ago. “I called Marc up and asked him if he wanted to design a collection for Fendi. I haven’t been involved at all,” Jones explained the collab. “We worked side by side during fittings. We were doing ours, he was doing his. I’m looking very much at 1997, and I think Marc’s is fresh and now.” Jones was after more of a feeling. “I was thinking about when I was first coming to New York and we would go out clubbing,” he said. Hence the irreverent, high/low mix of sequins and utility jackets, or a shearling sherpa and a mini. He meant what he said about utility. Even beanies and gaiters came with built-in Baguettes, as did many of the garments, those shearling sherpas most temptingly. Surprisingly, it all felt very early Sex & The City and Patricia Field style. For the kicker, Linda Evangelista, who is the current face of Fendi, glided out, resplendent in an opera cape, with a sterling silver Baguette bag in the crook of her arm. Jacobs, who joined Jones and Venturini Fendi for a bow, encouraged everyone to stand up – not that the crowd needed any convincing.
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