Kim Jones Stripped Down for Dior Men’s Fall 2025 Collection
For lean times, leaner clothes.
Kim Jones presented his fall collection for Dior in a black tent framing a white Busby Berkeley-style stairway. The clinically bare setting highlighted fabric and construction, the very fundamentals that set luxury clothing apart from mass-produced garments.
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To call the designs sparse would be misleading, but compared to last season’s craft-intensive outing, these monochromatic ensembles were sober at first glance. Take his Neo-like opening look: a monastic black coat worn as a long skirt.
Zoom in, and you alighted on exquisite details, like a folded neckline on a black leather sweatshirt, lifted from founder Christian Dior’s H-line silhouette, or glass beads sprinkled like raindrops on the shoulders of a navy suit, one of the 10 couture looks featured in the show.
“They’ve got very subtle embroidery. Couture is not about screaming at people. Sometimes it’s about just the make and the fabrication, especially in menswear,” Jones said in a preview. “It’s very Dior, looking at all the codes in a very graphic, pure way.”
Introduced in the 1950s as an antidote to the wasp-waisted proportions of the New Look, the H-line paved the way for the more streamlined styles of the 1960s and travels easily to a man’s wardrobe, in his opinion.
Delving into the archives makes sense at a time when many designers are doubling down on investment pieces in order to win back disaffected luxury consumers. “I don’t buy as much stuff, and when I do, I think about how long I’m going to wear it for,” Jones said. “The market’s evolving in a different way.”
He pointed to the success of the Dior Icons line, which trades in elevated basics ranging from 800-euro T-shirts to 4,500-euro coats.
Here, even the most streamlined designs came with some sort of twist, often lifted from the womenswear lexicon.
A black satin blouse with balloon sleeves was slit in the back, while bonded leather gave a sculptural flair to cropped bomber jackets. Meanwhile, a raised drawstring collar and buckled sleeves added a dash of drama to a black utility jacket.
Back in the 18th century, it was not unusual to see fashionable men sporting brightly colored silk damask coats. Jones channeled that idea with belted kimono jackets and a pink satin robe embroidered with a motif borrowed from Dior’s Pondichéry dress from 1948.
In a week when Loewe and Givenchy, fellow brands under the umbrella of luxury conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, sat out the runway season amid continued creative churn, the elegiac tone of the show — and its throbbing soundtrack by Michael Nyman — were read by some observers as signaling change for Jones as well, amid rumors that Maria Grazia Chiuri, artistic director of womenswear at Dior, is moving on from the job.
He was certainly thinking in terms of posterity. After the show, the designer received the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian distinction, in recognition of his services to fashion. “When you do stuff in a house, you always think about what will stay in the archive,” he noted.
But he’s also taking the temperature of consumers today. Jones was in China in November, and was struck by how fast it is changing.
“People are really concerned about the environment, thinking about sustainability,” he reported. “The young people are getting very interested in old culture and tradition, things that I hadn’t seen before, and I thought that was really fascinating.”
Conspicuous consumption is out. Quiet luxury is boring. But judging from the standing ovation from VIP guests including Jay Chou and Robert Pattinson, opulent minimalism may well be here to stay.
Launch Gallery: Dior Men Fall 2025 Ready-to-Wear Collection
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