The five giant cats on today’s Dior runway were based on the work of ceramicist Hylton Nel. “He’s an old friend of mine,” said Kim Jones in preview. “I love his work and I wanted to take that idea of working with an artist and working through the Dior archives.”
The studded outlines on boots, outerwear and tailoring as well as the badges, knitwear and socks were all created in partnership with Nel. The South African artist’s endearingly rendered animals even featured on punchily colored socks. Substantial ceramic beading fringed woven hats created by South African artisans and designed by Stephen Jones.
These crafty touches were applied around a quintessentially Jonesian collection through which was interwoven several elements. Impeccable modern tailoring was delivered in fabrics including eye-catchingly two tone tonic: The silhouettes were studied and sculptural. Similarly the workwear pieces, including waisted work jackets, rivet-pocketed chore jackets and some lovely linen-cotton artist’s jackets, had a lustrous sleekness to them that interestingly belied the roughness of the paradigms they were adapted from. Several looks paid convincing homage to Dior archive womenswear designs: pants with pleats that grew into wrap closures were particularly regal. “It’s about deconstructing womenswear and putting it back together as menswear,” said Jones. There was even a coat based on an unproduced design sketched by Yves Saint Laurent for the house.
The purity of design in Jones’s collections sometimes belies the sheer intensity of craft that is applied to them. The Nel floral jacket in Look 44, for instance, took 600 hours of hand beading embroidery to complete. The designer reported that grails such as this are the objects of intensely competitive desire amongst the house’s most dedicated customers. “We have a lot who come for one-on-one appointments, and they buy a huge amount of special pieces.”
“Dior for my real friends” read the Nel-scripted phrase on a sweater that was based on a plate once given to the artist by the designer. The line was a reference from the movie Love Is the Devil, about Francis Bacon’s tempestuous relationship with George Dyer. The reason for its inclusion here was less stormy, emphasized Jones. “We turned it into ‘Dior for my friends’ because they all ask for Dior.” And who wouldn’t? This was Kim Jones’s 60th show for the maison: He just doesn’t stop delivering.
