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The Kim Jones stimulus at Dior Men peaked once more in Miami last night, when he showed his Fall/Winter 2020 collection in the former Rubell Family Collection Museum—right across the street from the new Rubell Museum. The fact that the building is a repurposed DEA warehouse is ironic: Jones’ latest outing for Dior, a hallucinatory fusion of California surf, Parisian couture, and Miami Beach yacht club prep hit like a euphoric new party drug, jolting the brand onward into another new, strikingly fresh direction that continues Jones’ reign as one of menswear’s most innervating leaders.
The show began blissfully late after guests found their seats inside a rainbow-hued, gradient tunnel covered in Dior logos drawn by Shawn Stussy, who came out of retirement to collaborate on graphics (he left his namesake Stüssy label in 1996. Stüssy had no involvement or participation in this collection). The show notes called the space an “abstract barrel wave lit by a sunset.” A looping Vanity 6 remix immediately subsumed the crowd into a carbonated state of techno funk, an aggressive uptempo delirium that continued well into the night. The whole affair felt perfectly in synch with Art Basel Miami Beach which is just kicking off, as guests from the Rubell Museum’s opening wandered into the open air Dior party, wondering what was going on with all these fireworks and cars.
Since taking the helm of Dior’s men’s line in 2018, Jones has wasted zero tenths of a second injecting new energy into the brand while treading a fine line between hypermodernity and poetic reverence. Every collection, however elastically, ties directly into the legacy of Christian Dior. This season, Jones cited Dior’s exploratory spirit and interest in the culture clash between Europe and America, fitting for his first show on U.S. soil. There was also Jones’ signature pristine attention to detail, with several looks and accessories incorporating the Dior Oblique motif, and exquisite details like hand-sewn buttons, embroidery, beading, and sublime tailoring.
As the looks marched down the runway at a brisk clip, flaunting tropical wool jackets, technicolor berets, neon bucket hats with vivid flowers, white Stussy-squiggled tube socks and python-printed shorts, it felt as much a celebration of America as it was an in-your-face reading of the culture: “You did this,” Jones seemed to say, of the unnervingly original genre mashup devised for the season. America is the country where everything is everything, too much, all the time. More more more, now now now, never stopping not stopping, I’ll-sleep-when-I’m-dead hypercapitalist go-go accelerationism—an experience a designer like Jones, responsible for four fully loaded collections a year, can certainly relate to. America is also the birthplace of the high-low remix, an idea orchestrated with chaotic pleasure in clashing aesthetics here: it was like Vegas, Miami, Newport, and Laguna Beach fell into a blender with a batch of ketamine and vulcanized a new breed of merry pranksters, global travelers with a disco pulse and a surfer’s independence. It’s thrilling to watch the liberation of Jones under the halo of Dior, and this might have been his most gonzo moment yet.
Of course, the collection wouldn’t have been complete without a fetishistic collaboration to set the market on fire. That came in the form of Dior Air Jordans, made in partnership with Nike’s Jordan brand, featuring Dior-printed swooshes, branded clear soles, and a “Dior Air” insignia. Kim Jones is like the Marilyn Monroe of luxury streetwear collaborations: glamorous, classic, sexy, iconic, gentlemen prefer it… and these sneakers are on par with his greatest hits. They’ll be a holy grail for customers salivating to be a part of Jones’ world. And it is the world around Jones that makes his work at Dior as exciting as it is. With his crew of collaborators: Yoon Ahn on jewelry; Matt Williams on buckles; Melanie Ward styling; Guido Palau on hair; Peter Philips on makeup; A-Trak and Honey Dijon on music; Stephen Jones on millinery; and stellar front rowers like Kate Moss, Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Orville Peck, Maluma, David Beckham, Ladyfag, Daniel Arsham, Gwendoline Christie, Travis Scott, and Lily Allen—with a Miami addition of Ricky Martin—Jones has cultivated a distinct family around his Dior Men that gives as much pulse and personality to the brand as any of the artists who come through for their season-long residencies (Stussy joins previous art partners KAWS, Hajime Sorayama, Raymond Pettibon, and Arsham). The Jordans and the couture pieces alike might be museum-worthy, but this cast of creators belongs in the Fashion Hall of Fame.
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