BEAUTY: Clothing--Dior

For Dior Homme's Fall-Winter '20-'21 collection at Paris Fashion Week, creative director Kim Jones mined the Dior archives to bring elements and materials from 1950's haute-couture collections to this current menswear show. Of this collection, journalist Sarah Mower pointedly asks, "What if the 2020s are a time when it becomes completely anachronistic to think of clothes and fabrics being assigned by gender?" I hope she is right and I hope this is the last time I have to draw attention to the fact that men in this collection are wearing things like silk taffeta, pearl earrings, and opera gloves. They are not women's clothes, they are men's clothes because men are wearing them. A fabric is not gendered, it just is.

This glorious, stately collection is beautiful not only for the political and cultural statement I just outlined (and which we hope will normalize) but because of the simply gorgeous cuts of the garments themselves. This is one of those collections that require study since we are only able to see photos--but do click on each set and look at the exquisite detail of silhouette and material.

Equally as important is the deeper inspiration for Jones' collection: fashion stylist and jewelry designer Judy Blame (née Christopher Barnes) who had a fascinating and varied career. He ran a fashion-forward night club called Cha-Cha, helped shape the look and feel of the 1980s British magazines The Face and i-D, collaborated with club icon Leigh Bowery, was a stylist for Neneh Cherry, Boy George, Björk and Kylie Minogue, and worked with the fashion houses of John Galliano, Louis Vuitton, Gareth Pugh, and Comme des Garçons. But he was best known for his fantastical jewelry creations in which he extensively used found objects. To him, a safety pin was as beautiful as a diamond. Blame died two years ago this February and Jones created a special print for this collection in his honor. Instead of a Toile de Jouy, the traditional French fabric that shows bucolic, pastoral scenes from the 1700's, he blew it up and named it Toile de Judy. And there are some lovely pieces of jewelry that Blame would approve of. Take a look at the long, intriguing trinkets hanging off lapels and over pockets on jackets, or as necklaces, or dangling from belts.

Jones squeezed in one more homage: designer Marc Bohan had a 30-year career at the house (he even stepped in when then-creative director of Dior Yves Saint Laurent was called up for military service in 1960); a dazzling, show-closing bejeweled jacket of a pattern that looks like feathers was based on a dress from Bohan’s 1969 autumn-winter collection.

https://www.dior.com/