Kim Jones has remade Dior Men top to bottom in the 18 months since his debut—with a global team, with artist collaborations, and with a Saddle Bag for dudes, to say nothing of the pageantry he’s brought to the house’s pantsuits. But the most Jonesian development of all is the synthesis of high and low, couture and street. So integral is this intermingling to his Dior Men project that Jones rejects distinctions between the categories as old-fashioned and out of touch. “Today, people buy what’s the best,” he said in a pre-show interview, the implication being that Dior Men is deserving of the superlative.
The sales results bear that out, and Jones’s show in Miami Beach tonight should only make them rosier. Let’s start with the little matter of the collaboration with Shawn Stussy, who reimagined the house logo and bee. When the partnership was announced a day ahead of the show the internet lit up with anticipation. Jones has a preternatural ability for creating buzz; recall the Supreme collab he engineered while still at Louis Vuitton. On the surface, the Stussy arrangement might appear shrewd—a Supreme redux for his new French label—but it’s absolutely authentic. Jones began buying Stussy at 14 with money he saved up from a job washing dishes at a cafe and he remembers copying Stussy’s familiar scrawl in his school notebooks. “I don’t choose people just because they’re famous,” Jones said. “When something becomes as iconic as that it’s in the culture and culture is what I’m interested in.”