Kim Jones pithily summed his Spring/Summer 2024 Dior show up as “New Look to New Wave,” connecting the neon colours that pumped up the lineup, and the madcap headpieces created by Stephen Jones, to the London club scene of the 1980s. Fitting, given that Stephen Jones himself was a much-photographed habitué of those clubs and, indeed, in a roundabout way they brought him to Paris high fashion: he was recruited as an extra in a Culture Club video, spotted on-screen by Jean Paul Gaultier, and whisked off to create hats in the capital of fashion. It’s a fairytale, almost.
But I’m getting off-track. The new wave that Jones – Kim, not Stephen – mentioned could also mean the successors who have carried Dior’s flame, given the references in outfits to the work of Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan and Gianfranco Ferré, all former artistic directors of the house. Jones is now part of that continuum, this show celebrating five years at the house. Hence the fact this show was a marriage between glancing back and looking forwards, darting between time periods, yanking ideas from different pieces and transposing them to new garments. Look at the embroideries, which seemed to be taken from grand jewelled evening gowns and used to stud knitwear, or the bouclé tweeds requisitioned from polite Jolie Madame suits and used in brief shorts, or in coats with a couture swagger. And everything was criss-crossed with the quilted cannage pattern lifted from the rattan-backed Louis Seize chairs from Dior’s original Victor Grandpierre-decorated salon.
What was so remarkable – and has been, throughout Jones’ tenure – is how those elements of the past, when re-energised, could appear entirely modern, even forward-thinking. Even that is in the house tradition – Christian Dior’s much-heralded, Carmel Snow-christened ‘New Look’ was actually fashion’s biggest nostalgia trip of all, a fashion throwback to the glories of the Belle Époque, and arguably even further, to the crinolines of the Second Empire in the expansive petticoated skirts and handspan waists. But although, at a preview, Jones threw out references to Dior’s early adulthood in 1920s Granville, as well as the sixties couture of Saint Laurent and Bohan, there was no nostalgia here, rather using the romance of the past to create a brave new future.
That much was evident in the staging: a metal box with a gridded floor, seemingly severe and techno and very, very hot (some well-toned audience members even stripped off their tops, such was the sweltering temperatures). But perhaps, that was the point – a hothouse is where you breed exotic blooms, after all, and to begin the show Jones’ Dior models seemed to ‘grow’ out of the floor. The house called it a ‘mechanical garden’ and Jones’ models were masculine equivalents of Dior’s femme fleurs, in a natty piece of fashion theatre that had the audience howling their approval. That felt truly new.
