A Portrait of Dior’s Rudolf Nureyev-Inspired Collection by Keizo Kitajima

This story is taken from the Summer/Autumn issue of Another Man:

Haute couture is perceived, by many, as an inherently, intrinsically feminine world. That’s understandable. Couture is a realm of ball gowns and wedding dresses, of extravagant gestures and extreme silhouettes – Christian Dior’s wasp-waisted ‘Corolle’ line, Cristóbal Balenciaga’s gazar bizarrities that transformed women into walking pyramids of jet or abstract swirls of ruffles. Menswear, by contrast, is founded, sedate, safe. Anchored in the safe suit, draped in sedate black. Couture is a different world.

Except that it isn’t. There’s not just the tradition of Savile Row tailoring, custom-made clothes for men which can approach the extravagance (and expense) of anything created by Parisian houses, but a deeper history where male extravagance is entwined with female, both in execution and display. Haute couture was born from a cultural crucible in mid-19th-century Paris, a collision of high art and fashion that engendered a specifically male fascination with seemingly inextricably female adornment. But those cultural conditions spanned back to the court of Louis XIV, where in 1675, the king incorporated a guild of female dressmakers to make all clothes for women, the first regulation on the fashion industry in France. As a monarch, Louis was particularly fashion-conscious – for both men, and women – making his courtiers so fashion-conscious and etiquette-obsessed that he distracted them from any nascent thoughts of overthrow, or democracy. In short, he codified dress within his court as a means of control – which is what couture was all about, really. The consort of his great-great-great-grandson, Marie Antoinette, had her own ‘couturière’, Rose Bertin, dubbed by wags her ‘Minister of Fashion’, whose seemingly undue influence on the royal purse was often speculated to extend to political influence, too.

And speaking of control, how about the fact that it was only men who were allowed to create stays (the early version of the corset) for women during the 17th and 18th centuries? That work was seen as more skilled and physically demanding, given the manipulation of steel to re-forge the form of the body, yet the symbolism of a man’s handiwork literally shaping the body of a woman is loaded. And when couture emerged, fully-fledged, in the latter half of the 19th century, it was under the auspices of an Englishman, Charles Frederick Worth. He sought to elevate dressmaking to an art form, and dared to include his own name inside a garment intended for the French empress Eugénie. In doing so, Worth incorporated the notion of haute couture – high dressmaking, sewing elevated above the work of others by both its quality and its aspirations and inspirations – and also the designer brand as we know it. Incorporated in 1858, the house of Worth was the most powerful force in fashion for half a century, and its eponymous head was known as the ‘Dictator of Fashion’. “I have Delacroix’s sense of colour and I compose,” Worth once stated. “A toilette is as good as a painting.” The art posturing, perhaps, helped to alleviate the discomfort of prudish Victorians over the perceived proximity of a man to an undressed woman.

And of course, there were undressed men as well. The tight lacing of the 19th century – an extreme fashion even then – was practiced by some men as well as women. Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s scandal-ridden grandson, was rumoured to ‘lace’, as the terminology ran. He was also alleged to frequent male brothels, an early tying of a relationship with and interest in fashion to effeminacy. Men manipulating their bodies through fashion was nothing new – indeed, that was the whole point of tailoring, emergent in the late 18th century, crafting clothes that allowed men to emulate, of a fashion, the heroic, masculine figures of ancient Greco-Roman statuary. In a sense, men’s clothes have always tended closer to the body, exaggerating its realities rather than extrapolating entirely in the fashion of the crinoline, say, or panniers. But still, a similar instinct to transform was – is – there.

If haute couture from the 19th century through to the mid-20th defined fashion’s shifts and evolutions, since the 1970s it has occupied an entirely separate space: a precise and precious wardrobe proposition, for a tiny minority. In doing so, couture paradoxically harks back to how Elsa Schiaparelli originally conceived of the craft in the early 20th century: as “a laboratory of ideas”. One of the big ideas, an undercurrent now bubbling to the top, has been that of dressing men. Its first true protagonist was, probably, Jean Paul Gaultier, who offered menswear propositions sporadically throughout his 24 years as a couturier. His first haute couture show, launched under his own name in January 1997, was actually prefaced a year earlier in a menswear collection he called “Homme Couture”, where male models wore sharp tailoring, but also traditional couture gestures like bustles, trains and bustiers. Only, not normally seen on men. Gaultier’s declaration, later that year, that his couture would contain menswear caused consternation among the ranks of the Chambre Syndicale, the French fashion industry’s organising body. “They said the couture is for women,” said Lionel Vermeil, then Gaultier’s attaché de presse, to the New York Times. “I tried to understand if the couture had a sex.” Gaultier’s didn’t – that debut showed slithery silk taffeta jumpsuits, embroidered denims, a tulle coat festooned with roses and a onesie with a carved-out back overlaid with a veil of lace.

Today, that kind of freedom feels resurgent in menswear. Hence less a resurgence and more an emergence of men’s couture true – if once seen as an anomaly, it feels no less peculiar than its anachronistic womenswear counterpart. Indeed, if there is a minute yet healthy market for extraordinary, custom-made womenswear, there must equally be one present for men. That was the thought process behind Kim Jones’ latest endeavour at the house of Dior – an entire couture men’s collection, an evolution and expansion of styles he has been offering since his debut at the maison in 2018. Dior, of course, has its roots in haute couture, and in his translation of that legacy into menswear Jones has often hewed close to its origins. His first collection featured a trompe l’oeil toile de jouy, executed in 2,000 feathers across silk organza by the Parisian plumassier Janaïna Milheiro; throughout, he has allowed the muscle of the Dior ateliers to be flexed, both through the flamboyance of embellishments and shapes, and through subtle techniques – gentle drapes added to suits through moulage, couture’s age-old technique of hand-manipulation of fabrics, hand-finished fabric-bound buttons are drawn from the Tailleur Bar, as are pinched waists and exaggerated basques and even the cross-over diagonal lapels of the Oblique suit, drawn from a Dior ligne in 1950.

But Jones’ Dior men’s Winter 2024 couture collection was a different thing entirely. For one, it was 20 outfits presented as the crescendo to Jones’ show dedicated to Rudolf Nureyev, remixing the silhouettes of that menswear collection into a couture idiom. Wool became crocodile, or shifting into embroideries drawn from archival Dior ball gowns, painstakingly recreated but applied to shapes that spoke of sports, dynamism and activity. Nureyev’s kimonos were recreated using ancient Japanese methodologies, laborious and specialist: a silver Uchikake – or wedding – kimono was created using a hand-weaving technique known as hikihaku, based on threads of precious metals, and even semi-precious gemstones. Just one of those kimonos took ten people three months to execute. That is, of course, entirely in line with the ethos of Dior.

What was marked, however, was how Jones’ Dior married these extravagant effects with simplicity of line, reminiscent of the work of Yves Saint Laurent. He was Dior’s chosen heir apparent, whose seemingly short tenure as artistic director of the maison (1957-1960) was in actuality buffered by a preceding period as Dior’s first assistant, helping to translate Dior’s love of structure and extravagance into new styles keyed to a mood of freedom that would become prevalent in the 1960s. Jones’ clothes, inspired by Nureyev’s own wardrobe, moved freely around the body, in some cases undermining the preciosity of their surfaces. Ball gowns, become boiler suits. In a sense that is what haute couture should be about – silhouette and surface, a true marriage, neither upstaged. That menswear is so often entrenched in conservative values can mean that infinitesimal adjustments to silhouette become remarkable in their resonance. That is, perhaps, true of John Galliano’s incredible, wonderful spring collection for Maison Margiela, where 16 of 44 looks were for men. The most remarkable element, at first glance, was the silhouette – waists trained to Victorian proportions, some lesser than 26 inches, with superficially classic menswear garments fitted to those extraordinary shapes, caving in dramatically at the midriff. It takes the notion of couture’s second-skin fit to a new extreme. But the surfaces of these clothes were, again, the apparent ordinary made extraordinary – items that seemed to be tweeds or wools were, rather, layers of cotton, organza or tulle printed with trompe l’oeils of those other fabrics. Galliano named them “milletrage” – a portmanteau of mirage, mille-feuille and filtrage – and the final layers of tulle were intended to act like watercolour aunts, giving the impression of the fabrics being sun-bleached, water-marked or stained with oil. Something that could only be achieved with handwork, infinite time, experimental technique. Which is the meaning of couture, after all. 

Those notions, of course, have no gender. Which hark back to Gaultier – also a fan of men in corsets – who fought for the lack of gender in items like skirts and bustles, in textures like fur and sequins, which have often been restricted to women’s garbs. A corset on a man isn’t a travesty, Gaultier once insisted, but a bra is. The reason being that a bra serves a function – to support breasts, which a man doesn’t have. And while couture for men may seem like an extravagance, it is nonetheless anchored to the simple, human instinct of dressing a body. Something universal, and real.

Hair: Shingo Shibata at Streeters using Kevin Murphy. Make-up: Kanako Takase at Streeters using Addiction Tokyo. Models: Dugyeong Kim and Pierrick Gregoire at Select Model Management, Hamin Yu at Ford Models Paris, Tass Sarr at Premium Models and Siobahn Filliettaz at JR Models. Casting: Piotr Chamier at Streeters. Digital tech: Tsuvasa Saïkusa. Photographic assistants: Keiko Sasaoka and Paul Naophell. Styling assistants: Bella Kavanagh, Alexander Bainbridge and Christelle Nisin. Hair assistant: Hiro Furakawa. Make-up assistant: Clémentine Roy. Casting assistant: Benedikt Hetz. Production: Lotti Projects. Special thanks to Espace Niemeyer

This story features in the Summer/Autumn issue of Another Man, which is on sale internationally from April 25, 2024. Pre-order here.