KIM JONES CELEBRATES FIVE YEARS AT DIOR
“I CAN’T,” SAYS KIM JONES. HE’S BEEN ASKED TO PUT INTO WORDS a famous silhouette created by Yves Saint Laurent, one of his predecessors at the house of Christian Dior, in Paris. “You have to see it to understand it.” He slices the air with his hand, fingers slightly curved to form a serpentine line. “For me,” Jones says, “there’s a fluidity to his line that makes it very, very sensual. I think that’s what’s so appealing about his work.”
Saint Laurent was celebrated, as was Christian Dior before him, for his tailoring, among other things, which borrowed the structure and conventions of formal men’s clothes and applied them to womenswear, most famously in the case of Le Smoking, his dinner jacket, first seen in 1966 and a staple of elegant women’s wardrobes ever since. In his five years as artistic director of Dior Men’s, Jones, among the most gifted and successful fashion designers of his generation, has put tailoring at the centre of his collections, at least partly in homage to Dior and Saint Laurent.
“I love Saint Laurent,” Jones says, “because not only did he make things of beauty but he lived in beauty. He was an exceptional collector, from the best books to the best art. The fact that he had a Goya in his sitting room, on an easel! A terrifying fact to think about. Next to a Mondrian, next to a Picasso! The taste level was second to none. And he and [Saint Laurent’s partner] Pierre Bergé lived in that environment, which is extremely inspiring.”
It’s a wintry November afternoon in London, and the designer and I are sitting in the library of his house, a stunning Brutalist shell of glass, steel and punctured concrete, filled with extraordinary paintings and important furniture, pop-culture curios and exquisite objets d’art — and books, so many books, all beautifully bound: numerous first editions of Virginia Woolf (the Bloomsbury group is a particular passion), Allen Ginsberg (so are the Beats) and countless others.
On the walls: Francis Bacons, Lucian Freuds. There’s a fat Freud pigeon right behind me. The chair I’m perched on? Roger Fry. My eye is drawn to a Renaissance portrait of a stern-faced Italian nobleman. I peer at this individual for a while. “He’s over 500 years old!” I say, somewhat redundantly. “I know!” says Jones. On a table by the door, more recent purchases: Freddie Mercury’s sketch pad and cigarette case. These two will be presents for friends.
Their current owner is wearing a sweatshirt bearing the logo of the Aman hotel in Tokyo. A vintage gold Rolex Daytona, one of a number he owns, is fastened over one cuff: a Jones trademark, in the sty
