Collaborating with ceramic artist Hylton Nel for the new season, Kim Jones looks at the relationship between both the realms of art and fashion as a labour of love.
In Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting, the English singer admits, almost unwillingly, an affliction. “Cause every time it rains, you’re here in my head,” she sings in the song’s chorus. “Like the sun coming out, I just know something good is gonna happen.” It was these exact words as they played on the runway of Dior Men’s Summer 2025 show that made sense of the theme this season. Bush referenced the cloudbuster built by Wilhelm Reich in those lines, which he made because he believed he could harvest energy from the sky by making it rain. And each time it did rain, his son would be reminded of his father’s experiments. We could, perhaps, draw parallels to Dior’s mythology here: the cloudbuster as the house’s Couture creations; Wilhelm Reich as Monsieur Dior; and the son as Kim Jones, who now has the task of keeping the keepsakes alive for generations to come, in remembrance of the originator.
The labour of research that Wilhelm Reich had achieved in his lifetime was just as arduous as Christian Dior when he soared to the top of Paris’ radar after creating some of fashion’s most revolutionary works. And it’s this expression of pure hard work — the idea that the art of creation is remarkable — that lends inspiration for the new season, which the men’s artistic director had shifted his interest towards almost completely. It’s a sensibility that both, or perhaps all, designers innately share. And Jones, who was born and raised in London’s blooming art and design scene in the 1990s, would understand best the thrills of workmanship — after all, being in the middle of the DIY scene back then.
Hylton Nel, a ceramic artist with a wondrous naivety for the bold and animated, is Jones’ collaborator for the season. Those who follow Jones’ work closely will understand the pure decisiveness of this partnership: pottery was an element that intrigued Monsieur Dior, and the New Romanticism of Nel’s work are mere understated familiarity and reverence for Jones’ youth. Thus, the amalgamation of ideas for Summer 2025 that sees the pastels and motifs in Nel’s ceramics remoulded on the Dior archives. Here, we see the fragile and rigid state of Nel’s ceramics come alive once again as soft, delicate fabrications. It also highlights that the qualities of both the art of making fashion and ceramics as closer than one may think — requiring hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work. Like a tailored look in the collection, which took months of artisan processes to achieve.
With that in mind, the new collection also looks at being an amalgamation of voices — the hardest work there is yet. It isn’t the result of one individual, instead, it’s a collection of different points of view. Sculptural silhouettes call back not only to the shapes formed by ceramics but to the New Look. An unrealised Yves Saint Laurent-made sketch from the Fall/Winter 1958 collection has a new lease of life but in a tailoring standard of Jones. The charms in the collection — found on headwear, as pins, and details on accessories, are miniatures of Nel’s works. The Saddle, a Galiano component, remains the main bag of choice. Just as the music in the show would hum (“just saying it could even make it happen”), it’s a reminder that the work of Dior Men is always on the verge of receding to that realm of fantasy, where couture always lives on, in memory alike.
Once you’re done with this story, click here to catch up with our June/July 2024 issue.
RELATED ARTICLES
The Ballad of The Mechanical Timepiece
