Day three of Paris Fashion Week men’s edition and the heavens opened once again, as grey skies gave way to torrential downpours that threatened to turn even the chicest, most put-together editor into a bedraggled drowned rat. Brightening things up this afternoon, though, was Kim Jones, who debuted what he’d been working on for the last six months at Dior. Not in Paris? Here’s everything you need to know .
As per usual, Jones drew in a massive crowd of friends, family, and fans. Lining the front row were equally batshit house ambassadors Gwendoline Christie and Robert Pattinson, longtime bestie Kate Moss, DJ and producer Honey Dijon, Korean actors Han So-hee and Nam Joo-hyuk, and Succession star Kieran Culkin. Joining them was also a bunch of his London fam, including former mentor and Fashion East legend Lulu Kennedy.
The show was staged as it often is at the École Militaire – or military school for those whose French doesn’t quite stretch that far – where Dior had erected a massive box to host guests. Inside it was actually pretty stripped back this season. Gone were the offbeat cat sculptures Kim had South African artist Hylton Nel create for SS25 and instead there were just two sets of stairs – one that models descended down as they first emerged from backstage, and another that led back down into the depths of the school, where they disappeared after they’d taken their lap of the runway.
As a designer, Kim Jones is probably better known for his playful approach to design and a proclivity for toeing the line between relaxed tailoring, streetwear, and casual dressing than he is for his haute couture. But having dabbled in the couture atelier a little bit in past seasons and debuting a series of pieces for Dior that fit the high-sewing bill, this time around he really immersed himself in the practice. Digging deep into the house’s vast archives, he revealed he had intended to strip it back for AW25, sending out a collection made up of clean silhouettes and refined garments.
“We wanted to go back to the roots and concentrate on the quintessence of the house,” said Jones. “There is a sense of fashion history, particularly the history of menswear, running through this collection. The shift from something quite ornate and extravagant in the eighteenth century to something more linear and utilitarian in the nineteenth, with the beginnings of modern menswear.” Despite the designer taking us on a tour of menswear’s past, ultimately, he says, he wanted the collection to “say something about now.”
First out of the gate came a series of voluminous opera-like coats, some cinched at the middle to accentuate the waist, before models in slim tailoring – like neat, boxy leather jackets and cigarette trousers that were abbreviated at the ankle – made their way down Kim’s illuminated staircase and through the space. Fine-gauge knits were adorned with glittering crystal panels while lapels were pinned with ornate brooches. From the off, models wore delicate silk blindfolds (though miraculously still made it up and down the stairs), a riff on the concept of chiaroscuro, an artistic technique that plays with dark and light.
Next came almost ecclesiastical gowns which billowed as their wearer walked, as well as loose trousers which swished around the legs and gave the appearance of a skirt when they moved. With delicate satin blouses rounding things off, it was possibly the most elegant show Kim has ever turned out, although he kept his signature street-inflected edge with clean new iterations of classic Dior sneakers and a host of Saddle bags, which since being reintroduced in 2021 shows no signs of going anywhere.
