“Between stages. It’s as if they’ve left one set and are about to step onto another.” There’s a hint of double in Kim Jones’ “Backstage” set for his pre-spring lookbook shoot meaning. On the one hand: the pre-anything collection is an “in between” season, having to juggle multiple garments and accessories at once. One more thing: Jones revealed (or rather, teased) that he was preparing to enter another phase of his career as artistic director of Dior Men. “The next show is my fifth anniversary. So I’m going to do something different to mark the time.”
If pre-co doesn’t quite serve as his five-year review, That was another design demonstration of how Jones fluidly created a lingua franca for Dior Men, all the while maintaining his own British accent. This season, he’s incorporated Ray Petri’s buffalo style into a classic Dior palette, playing with the house’s logo and pairing it with sparkling jewels from the French state’s highest honor.
Jones is a living encyclopedia of youth subcultures that he has infused into his writing since his school days. “I looked at Buffalo because that was the first time I was exposed as a young man to this London style that combined haute couture with vintage,” he says. “Ray Petri was really a key person in a collaborative team of people doing different jobs — cameraman, filmmaker, singer. And, you know, I think that’s how I approach my work. The thing is, you see today Those pictures, they’re totally modern. They’ll make the dress look like the most masculine thing in the world.”
(In short: Petri was invented for male editorial shoots “look ‘ and the creative power of ‘street casting’ – long before anyone used those terms – in British magazines The Face, iD and Arena. Buffalo Ray Petri, edited by Mitzi Lorenz and published by Westzone on 2000, is a Good primer on fashion history – curious.)
This info applies to the way Jones keeps putting together evolving elements of his Dior wardrobe: boxer shorts under coats , paired with chunky military boots; the skirt references buffalo skirts and Egypt-like moments from a collection he showed at his recent show in Cairo; his original army surplus MA-1 flight jacket version, Petri’s Buffalo style from London Gay working-class club clothing codes elevated to mainstream fashion.
