Anna Wintour awards Dior’s Kim Jones the Legion of Honour in Paris
In Paris this evening, Vogue editor Anna Wintour was given special privilege – one imagines – to award British designer Kim Jones the Legion of Honour for his work at Dior Men. It’s a distinctly French award, so it was notable that Wintour – a Brit in New York – was allowed, but fitting in that Wintour peppered her speech with some British humour.
“Kim is not only a designer, but he is a polymath. He is a botanist and a zoologist. He’s the person you want to have with you when you’re on a dinghy to a remote Scottish Island to see the millions of puffins that live there. Kim is equally an archeologist, a curator and an historian. Each of these professions, of course, share a devotion to collecting something about which he is fanatical. And I do mean fanatical. Kim’s adoration of the Bloomsbury group is well known. He has collected first editions from Duncan Grant and Virginia Woolf, acquiring them in the way that the rest of us buy Diet Coke or toothpaste.” Jones, 51, was visibly emotional at the prestigious ceremony, flanked by actor Robert Pattinson and the Arnault family who hired him to shake up Dior and Fendi.
Stephen Doig
The show earlier was a spectacle. Suspend for a moment your thoughts on whether you or I would look good in a blush pink silk taffeta duster coat with a bow at the back, as starched and regal as anything Princess Margaret might have worn when Monsieur Dior was courting the young royal at Blenheim Palace back in the 1950s. Instead, consider the fact that Kim Jones – creative director of Dior Men – has explored during his tenure at the house an idea of couture for men. That is, the upper echelons of the highest form of fashion in terms of craft and artisanal rarity, applied to men’s wardrobes. Which is an idea he developed at his Dior Men’s show in a rain-lashed Paris on Friday, in what was seen as a grand finale to his stewardship of the house, with rumours abounding that Jones is set to step down.
And fittingly for a Brit boy, Jones, who cut his teeth at heritage house Dunhill, demonstrated with true London gumption that if it is his final collection, he was going to damn well show ’em what he’s made of. This wasn’t the first time Jones has employed the might of the Dior couture atelier on his menswear, nor taken the feminine codes of Christian’s Dior’s original designs and applied them to the menswear of the house.
That could easily end up as pantomime dame costumery, but under Jones’s hand it resulted in soft, feminine shapes – a billowing cape, jackets that plumed on the sleeves and on the shoulders, dustings of crystal on jackets – with sharp tailoring and minimalist, Japanese-inspired necklines. It meant that the more outré pieces were tempered with a clean simplicity to stop them veering into Liberace theatricality.
The palette was cleansed too: the odd touch of pink, but mainly blacks, touches of caramel and clotted cream and the signature Dior grey. Jones cited the ultimate ladies man Casanova as a reference – hence the Zorro-like eye masks – but the effect in some of the more dazzling pieces was of a Gen Z, 21st-century Louis XIV.
Jones also knows how to cut an excellent suit – that Savile Row background – and there was plenty of crisp, severe tailoring for the man who’s less inclined towards a sweeping cape or a flyway silken blouse; suits inspired by the Dior Bar jacket but rendered for men with nipped-in waist and razor-sharp shoulders. There was also a dose of crocodile jackets and zippy little silk bombers for the Dior nuts-and-bolts luxury customer. Those were the items that the celebrity contingent steered towards, namely Robert Pattinson and freshly Oscar-nominated Kieran Culkin, who sat front row alongside Kate Moss.
Jones is set to be awarded with France’s highest accolade, the Legion D’Honneur, on Friday evening, in a ceremony hosted by Anna Wintour. That particular piece de resistence, mixed with the fact that this collection felt like a show of prowess in terms of what Jones is capable of, lent weight to the rumours that this will be his swan song. Especially given the fact that Jones tends to invite collaborators into the world of Dior, from artists to musicians and even Lewis Hamilton.
This time, it was just him, and the original style language that Monsieur Dior set so firmly into fashion history in the short period he founded and ran the house before his untimely death. It was also a reminder that in the global game of fashion Jenga, with luxury houses shuffling designers like football’s transfer season, a British designer has helmed both Dior and, until recently, Fendi.
The final outfit was as stupendous as anything you might see in the archival couture imagery of Monsieur Dior’s time at the house; a candy glossy confection of pink silk in coat form embroidered in crystals and wended with grey florals. Jones was showing how artistic and expressive the Dior striker can be, rather than lending pointers into how men are going to dress in 2025.
Are men today going to be clamouring for a spot of ruching on their sleeve or operatic swish to their silk coat of an evening? Some are, but this was fashion as its most rarefied rather than the more starched, sartorial end of men’s dressing. For naysayers who might scoff, these proportions, silhouettes and plushness of fabrications were historically signifiers of alpha power back in the courts of Louis XIV, so don’t knock it as “effete” just yet.
It might take some convincing for the captains of industry and problematic tech bros of Silicon Valley to adopt them – the very ones that Dior chief executive Delphine Arnault, daughter of LVMH owner Bernard Arnault, was controversially seen alongside at the Trump inauguration this week – but there’s more than one kind of powerful mode of dressing for men. Kim Jones, in his thoughtful way, demonstrates that real men wear pink with aplomb. And how much of a great British success story he’s been during his time at the biggest name in French fashion.
