Clarity. Fendi AW23 Couture

July 8, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Kim Jones placed the creative synergy between himself and Delfina Delletrez at the heart of his Fendi haute couture show, and it worked: the collection felt assured and strong, comparing to his last attempts at the brand. “I started with looking at Delfina’s Fendi high jewelry, which she’s done for the first time,” he said. His palette flowed “in almost an organic way, with colors and embroideries based around the hues of natural stones, rubies and sapphires,” he added. “It’s the idea of the silhouette being ‘nothing’, but everything at the same time.” This collection didn’t reinvent the wheel, but it had couture clarity that can subtly compare with Pierpaolo Piccioli’s couture work at Valentino. The aesthetic Jones established is based around draped, wrapped, shapes – 1990s minimalist aesthetics merged with echoes of the statuary of ancient Rome, where Fendi is based. This season’s iteration became his canvas for the launch of Delletrez’s 30-piece collection of Fendi precious jewels. The models walked around a marble floored quadrangle, a scenographic impression of Fendi’s headquarters in Rome. Most were clutching a version of a Fendi bag – small rectangular leather jewelry boxes. Delfina’s distinctive diamond earrings, brooches, and necklaces shone from the runway. “Everything is very fluid,” she explained, showing how she created draped, asymmetrical shapes, studded with pink spinels and yellow diamonds, ingeniously incorporating tiny geometric plays on the Fendi logo.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram! By the way, did you know that I’ve started a newsletter called Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!

Men’s – Higher Than The Sun. Dior SS24

June 24, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Kim Jones‘ first collection for Dior seems like yesterday, but believe it or not, 5 years have passed since his big debut. I wasn’t always a fan of his work at the Parisian brand, but his recent collection – and especially spring-summer 2024 – make me change my mind. For this anniversary collection, Jones turned towards a canonical trio of Dior designers who preceded him. He referenced Yves Saint Laurent, Gianfranco Ferré, and Marc Bohan, enmeshing motifs from their times here with propositions of his own. The membrane the connected them all was Christian Dior’s cannage, the pattern the house founder based on the woven rattan chairs in which guests sat at his first salon show in 1947. The show opened with a coup de théâtre: the wide runway was composed of polished metal gray tiles. As the first Andrew Weatherall–conjured wheezing whalesong of Primal Scream’s “Higher Than the Sun” began to roll, the entire cast of models was raised from beneath the runway in a three-wide, 17-long grid of looks.

Jones’s design credentials are undisputed. He is also an extremely accomplished visual editor. He studded polished jewels on cardigans draped over the collection’s straight-legged, high-hemmed, high skirted tailoring, and then that over piqué polo shirts set with yet more jewels. Can we talk about the knitted beanies with velvet flower brooches?! Obsessed. Tweed loafers had buckles derived from a Lady Dior fragrance motif. Marled jacquard cannage knits in punchy colors were worn shoulder robed over more of the tailoring. Some jackets, semi-safarienne, were set with a bow at the breast pocket. Long tweed coats, high notch-collared and double breasted, featured the faded rattan shape within their muesli flecks and appeared to be bonded dresses worn from the shoulder. Dior’s Mitzah Bricard–inspired leopard print was reproduced on Saddle bags and vests. These were worn with sporty tweed shorts, which were later placed against tweed and piqué twinsets. The punches of fluoro green and orange added a psychedelic touch. As the designer put it himself: “It’s a collage of different designers in the archive expressed in shape, color, form and mood.”

Floatiness. Fendi SS23 Couture

January 28, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

“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.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!

Men’s – Renewal & Change. Dior AW23

January 22, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!

RetroFuture. Dior Pre-Fall 2023

December 7, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.