In a trend that could have wide-ranging implications for fashion, yet another established designer is giving up on waiting for a big brand job — and starting his own line.
Kim Jones, the former creative director of Louis Vuitton men’s wear, Fendi women’s wear and Dior Men, and the man who injected cool into luxury via collaborations with Supreme, Travis Scott and Kaws (among others), announced on Monday the creation of a namesake line. His first collection will appear in mid-2027.
“I didn’t want to go and look at another archive,” Jones said. “I wanted to look at something new.”
Jones left Dior in January 2025, fed up with swirling rumors about an impending change in creative leadership (which eventually came to pass). Almost immediately, he said in a video call from London, where he is based, “people were like, ‘What are you going to do next? Where are you going to go?’” — as if the only obvious choice was another big house owned by a conglomerate.
Though he took on various projects, largely in Asia — creating a premium line for the Chinese outerwear label Bosideng, reimagining the Essentials line for Aman — he just thought, “Well, I’m going to do it for myself.”
In this, he joins peers like Phoebe Philo, who started her own line in 2021 after highly successful stints at Chloé and Celine, and Francesco Risso, who left Marni in June 2025 and introduced his own creative hub, the Bureau of Imagination, during the recent Milan Fashion Week. And all of them are following in the footsteps of Tom Ford, who left fashion after transforming Gucci and Saint Laurent, only to return to establish his namesake house (sold to Estée Lauder in 2022).
In each of these cases, the designers were willing to trade chasing the support, size and “protection” (Jones’s word) of a giant corporation for the freedom and risk of doing it their own way, while leveraging the expertise and name recognition gained from their time at the big brands to jump-start their projects.
If those projects work — and Philo’s line, which has grown steadily in both influence and sales since its debut, is an unquestionable success — they could change the relationship of designers and the big brands they have recently served.
Such moves transform the narrative around creative directors as work for hire, snapped up and sucked dry by corporate overlords who discard talent on an increasingly rapid cycle, into empowered employees who are exploiting the brands as much as the brands are exploiting them.
Given the churn in the industry in which Anthony Vaccarello just parted ways with Saint Laurent after 10 years; Hedi Slimane is still unemployed after runs at Dior Homme, Saint Laurent and Celine; and questions surround the futures of Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga and Alessandro Michele at Valentino, that is not an immaterial evolution. Simply consider the fact that Michele’s signature eclectic style, established first at Gucci but considered stale at Valentino, would most likely be embraced in a Michele brand (if that ever happened).
And it defies recent industry wisdom that holds that it is simpler to rebuild a heritage brand than to create a new house from scratch.
Just as Ford parlayed his relationship with Estée Lauder into a new cosmetics line, which in turn created the foundation for his fashion line, Jones is leaning on his popularity in Asia to power his company and to give him the luxury of creating his own system.
His new brand will include men’s and women’s wear and will debut with a 4,000-square-foot store in Central Yards in Hong Kong and a global e-store. With tailoring made in Japan and leather goods in Italy, the line will be priced from 150 British pounds for a T-shirt to 1,300 pounds for a cashmere overcoat (about $200 and $1,700). Reversible gabardine jackets, cropped and cut on the curve like a tailcoat, will be about 950 pounds ($1,250). It is financed by Jones as well as an investor he declined to name.
He may, for example, do a show, not during the ready-to-wear season but before his Hong Kong store opening, and it will be largely for consumers, not industry insiders. And he isn’t planning to wholesale his clothes. Rather, he will have shop-in-shops in European department stores.
Before he left Dior, Jones was feeling increasingly disillusioned with the state of the luxury business. “Despite the fact your lunch is always there on the table at lunchtime, and people are always really sort of flattering and complimentary, it can feel a bit like you’re behind glass,” he said. “You get to a point in your life when you’re like, ‘Time is worth more than money.’”
Besides, he said: “The prices were just too high. A T-shirt going from 300 pounds to, like, 1,100 pounds is a big jump. I didn’t know any young person that could afford that. It’s like, ‘Would you want a bag or a holiday with your family?’”
Now, he said, he may have only 10 employees, and he may be “a bit panicked some days, but I can do whatever I want.”
“We have agility,” he continued. “We’ll be doing furniture. We’ll be doing anything. If I wanted to just put 10 cars in the store, I can. If someone wanted their home done, we could do their home.”
If he has a model, he said, it’s “Ralph Lauren, but for the 21st century.”
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