Just a week ago, Kim Jones marched out onto an ice rink-size runway in Paris, taking a bow at the conclusion of his latest show as the men’s creative director at Dior.
That show would be his last.
On Friday, Mr. Jones, a British fashion designer who has held that role since 2018, announced he was leaving the brand.
“It was a true honor to have been able to create my collections within the house of Dior, a symbol of absolute excellence. I express my deep gratitude to my studio and the ateliers who have accompanied me on this wonderful journey,” Mr. Jones said in a news release announcing his departure.
In the statement, Delphine Arnault, the chief executive of Dior, thanked Mr. Jones for his “remarkable work.”
“With all his talent and creativity, he has constantly reinterpreted the house’s heritage with genuine freedom of tone and surprising, highly desirable artistic collaborations,” Ms. Arnault said.
It was only a week ago, in the hours after Mr. Jones’s final Dior show, that Ms. Arnault and her brother Antoine stood in the audience with members of Mr. Jones’s staff, designers like Zac Posen and celebrities including Kieran Culkin to watch Mr. Jones receive the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur medal from Anna Wintour. In light of the latest news, that award could be seen as the bow tied around his design career at Dior.
The departure did not appear to be a mutual decision, as the news release emphasized that Mr. Jones had “decided to leave his position,” a phrasing that will certainly not be overlooked by the rumormongers of the fashion world.
After all, news of Mr. Jones’s departure comes bundled in a dust cloud of gossip about what is next for him and for Dior. For weeks, the wider fashion world has been humming with the notion that Jonathan Anderson, a fellow designer in the LVMH stable, may be set to take the reins of both men’s and women’s wear at Dior. As of now, Maria Grazia Chiuri remains the women’s creative director, and the news release announcing Mr. Jones’s departure did not comment on future plans for the brand.
Mr. Jones’s imprint on Dior was considerable. His first official design for the label was a genteel morning coat and pants worn by David Beckham to the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. It was quite a way to get the public’s attention.
At Dior, Mr. Jones introduced couture for men, enticing the flashy and fortunate with beaded tunics and operatic robes that pushed into the six figures. And he sold a mountain range worth of oblique-logoed sneakers and collaborative Birkenstock mules as he raised the men’s business to a new altitude.
Mr. Jones offered a sensuous view on men’s wear at Dior. It would be wrong to say his designs were gender-blurring; rather, they liberally plucked strands from the women’s department. Throughout his tenure at the label, his interest was in archetypical men’s wear silhouettes like double-breasted suits, streaming overcoats and bombers.
His color schemes brimmed with tender pinks, icy grays and palate-cleansing whites. He dispensed with roughshod tweeds in favor of delicate textiles, manifesting in lacy tops and silken blazers. He transposed Dior’s shapely saddle bag purses to its men’s line.
From go, collaborations were a crucial pillar of Mr. Jones’s Dior. His very first collection was rounded out by a collaboration with the American artist Kaws; he even had Kaws’s signature cartoon figure “Companion,” the size of an apartment building, loom over the runway.
Mr. Jones, an avid art collector, designed clothes with a rangy roster of artists and celebrities including Daniel Arsham, Kenny Scharf, Raymond Pettibon, Hylton Nel and even Travis Scott. And he happily made room at the top of Dior for designers he revered — young and old. He plucked Shawn Stussy out of relative retirement to team up on his pre-fall 2020 collection and later tapped the California wunderkind Eli Russell Linnetz for a 2023 collection. (Mr. Jones was also a champion of Virgil Abloh, letting him sleep on the couch in his London home years before Mr. Abloh made it to Louis Vuitton.)
A graduate of Central Saint Martins in London, Mr. Jones ran his own label before becoming the creative director of the stalwart British label Dunhill in 2008. Three years later, he caught the attention of LVMH and was named style director of men’s wear at Louis Vuitton. His collections, frequently drawing on his off-season travels, melded the utilitarian and the fantastical. A 2017 collaboration with the streetwear label Supreme opened the door, for better and for worse, to our current moment, in which hype and luxury are virtually handcuffed together.
In 2020, Mr. Jones became women’s artistic director at Fendi, assuming a post held by Karl Lagerfeld until his death. Mr. Jones’s Fendi was received coolly by critics and never seemed to take flight. He stepped down from the role last October.
His final collection for Dior was a rearticulation of those principles — splendor and edginess, femininity and pugnacity — that had made his vision so compelling back in 2018. There were no collaborations, no lumbering statues dotting the runway to distract, just pieces like a glassy bonded leather jacket, an hourglass-cinched jacket in spotless ivory and elephantine trousers that appeared to be sculpted, not sewn.
At the end, Mr. Jones left not with a bang, but with some beauty.
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