Kim Jones’s fall 2025 collection for Dior Men was the standout at the menswear shows earlier this month. It fully realized the vision of male elegance the designer had been slowly but confidently building on since his first outing back in 2018, and, above all, it finally seemed to offer a new idea about the way men should dress today. “I think fashion is quite in flux, in an unsettling moment, so you have to come up with something that’s quite sure,” Jones told Vogue Business on the day of the show. There was a sense in the room that the collection was his closing statement at the house. The rumor mill had been spinning. Today, the news was confirmed: After seven years, Kim Jones is leaving his role as artistic director at Dior Men.
What the future holds for Jones, now a free agent as he also left his post at Fendi in October of last year, remains to be seen. What is crystal clear is his impact in menswear at large after 15 years at LVMH—eight at Louis Vuitton and seven at Dior. Jones made collaborations luxury fashion’s second favorite (the first being a viral celebrity moment—of which he also had many) and merged Monsieur Dior’s mid-century couture vernacular with menswear’s knack for anything utilitarian seamlessly and with aplomb. He created a new, softer and elevated language for men’s style that helped define the past half decade of menswear, and reached new heights with his ever ambitious and always surprising showmanship. Last week, Jones was made a chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian honor.
“I’m all about life and chapters,” Jones offered the evening of his knighting. “I realized that it makes life feel longer,” he continued. “You look at things and you’re like, ‘that chapter is great, that chapter might not be so great. This chapter is good, that next chapter will be exciting.’ That’s how I view the world.” Read through to find the seven ways in which Jones changed Dior Men—and menswear—in seven years. This chapter has been remarkable.
What’s In a Name? From Dior Homme to Dior Men
It may have not pleased the purists that Jones came out of the gate swinging by renaming Dior Homme as Dior Men. While there is much to be said about the way today’s world has embraced anglicisms across most languages, this rebranding and literal translation had less to do with Jones, an Englishman, taking over a French maison, and more about giving it a global feel. Prior to joining Dior, Jones had made Louis Vuitton menswear a truly international phenomenon. Switching “Homme” to “Men” was only the tip of the iceberg of what Jones had planned for Dior. For further context, the name switcheroo went into effect between his debut show and his follow up pre-fall 2019 collection in Tokyo. Presentations in Giza, Miami, London, and Venice Beach would soon follow.
Kim Jones, The Greatest Showman
Speaking of Tokyo, the show there was staged around a 39-and-a-half-foot statue of a silver robo-babe by the Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama. Jones’s debut featured a 33-foot-tall floral sculpture by Kaws made of 70,000 peonies and roses (Monsieur Dior loved roses). Jones, the showman that he is, was a true runway innovator. Past the fabulous and gigantic sculptures, and a mesmerizing, fever-dream of a show around the Giza Pyramids in Egypt, Jones had models surface from the floor like touring pop-stars (spring 2024), walk around a makeshift garden (spring 2023), cross a life-sized copy of Pont Alexandre III in a tent on Place de la Concorde (fall 2022), strut down an 80-meter-long facsimile of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (pre-fall 2022), and pose on a travelator (fall 2019).
Couture for Men, This Time For Real
Fashion has not met a single menswear designer who has not promised “couture for men.” That may be a slight overstatement—who doesn’t love a little drama?—but Jones’s commitment to delivering the goods wasn’t. From the start, Jones, one of contemporary menswear’s most ingenious and inventive tailors, promised to align Dior’s menswear output closer to its founder, Monsieur Dior. He delivered: There were those fantastic satin sashes he draped into the lapels of his jackets (fall 2019, spring 2020) as a nod to Monsieur Dior’s couture archive, some taffeta swing coats (fall 2020), a range of opulent embroidered capes (fall 2024), a few Dior Bar jackets pour homme, of course, and his swansong for fall 2025, Jones’s best collection to date. Most importantly, Jones riffed on the Dior couture archive like no other men’s designer before him: For fall 2024, he reissued the embroidery of Monsieur Dior’s “Debussy” gown from the spring 1950 collection. He turned it into a vest. Such was the range of his couture-inflicted menswear; elegant and novel but wearable nonetheless.
The Collab King
A most important piece of Kim Jones lore is that he spearheaded the collaboration between Supreme and Louis Vuitton back in 2017, which, as we all know now in hindsight, altered the course of luxury fashion by pushing collaborations of the same kind to the forefront and showing the potential of a synergy between luxury and streetwear. At Dior, Jones flexed his eye for a best-selling collab, finding partners in everyone from rapper Travis Scott to then-budding designer Eli Russell Linnetz. He partnered with artists such as Raymond Pettibon, Daniel Arsham, Amoako Boafo, Kenny Scharf, and many, many more. Lest we forget the newsiest, viral-est of them all: Shawn Stussy. “I don’t choose people just because they’re famous,” Jones said at the time. “When something becomes as iconic as that, it’s in the culture, and culture is what I’m interested in.”
Kim Jones’s Cabinet of Curiosities
For his fall 2023 show, Jones invited his close pals Robert Pattinson and Gwendoline Christie to recite “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot, which the poet wrote in the aftermath of World War I. Jones owns six copies of this pivotal work of English literature. This was one of the many times Jones put on his collector’s hat as he went into the Dior atelier. Most recently, he put five giant iterations of work of ceramicist Hylton Nel on his spring 2025 runway. Jones built a show and collection around Rudolf Nureyev, based on photographs his uncle, Colin Jones, took of the acclaimed dancer. A lover and connoisseur of youth subcultures, Jones referenced the 1980s Buffalo style of Ray Petri, cited Jack Kerouac and the Beat generation, and often quoted the 20th-century bohemian Bloomsbury Group.
A Christian Dior Biographer
It is well known that Kim Jones is a history buff, but past his own obsessions, he also often explored the life and work of Monsieur Dior past Bar jackets and the New Look. Jones’s debut collection featured tiny flower motifs made to mimic the color and pattern of Monsieur Dior’s porcelain dinner service, and he had toile de Jouy patterns made to imitate the fabric on the walls of the first boutique M. Dior had, in 1947. Christian Dior was also heavily involved in the art world, exhibiting Picassos in the late 1920s, and so Jones saw his partnerships with artists at Dior Men as a nod at the founder’s own art inclinations. Jones’s second collection, presented in Japan, was a nod at Dior’s love for Japanese culture—its two closing looks were based on his own patterns for a Japanese client. There was also the time Jones had his models traverse a garden modeled after Dior’s in the Normandy village of Granville.
“Dior for My Real Friends”
Such was Jones’s tagline for spring 2025. The line referenced Love Is the Devil, the film about Francis Bacon’s relationship with George Dyer. “We turned it into ‘Dior for my friends’ because they all ask for Dior,” Jones told Luke Leitch at the time. And that they do. From Gwendoline Christie and Kate Moss to Robert Pattinson, Bad Bunny, and the Beckham family, they all have sported Kim Jones’s work over the years, and they’ve worn it well.
