Kim Jones Is Exiting Dior Men’s After a Game-Changing Tenure

Kim Jones saved his best for last.

Just one week ago, the British fashion designer wowed Paris Fashion Week with one of the most stupendous Dior Men’s shows of his career. Today, Jones announced his exit from the French luxury house after a seven-year tenure in which he accelerated the convergence of men’s fashion, art, and celebrity to warp speed.

“It was a true honor to have been able to create my collections within the House of Dior, a symbol of absolute excellence,” Jones said in a statement. “I express my deep gratitude to my studio and the ateliers who have accompanied me on this wonderful journey. They have brought my creations to life.”

In the statement, Dior CEO Delphine Arnault hailed Jones for his creativity and the “genuine freedom of tone” in his work. Pointedly, the Dior press release noted that Jones “decided to leave his position.”

Jones has always had a keen sense of timing. Last Friday’s Dior show was a masterclass in silhouette and craft that reminded the hundreds-strong crowd—most of whom got on their feet to give the misty-eyed designer a roaring ovation during his bow—that few can engineer legitimate men’s fashion moments quite like Jones. Several hours later, Anna Wintour pinned the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur medal on Jones’s lapel in front of a room packed with celebrities and luxury industry play callers, including several members of the LVMH-ruling Arnault family.

The grand finale of Kim Jones at Dior Men.

In a preview the day before, Jones revealed little about an impending split, though he explained that the palette-cleansing collection of couture-inspired “H-line” suits and silk faille swing coats emerged from a bit of creative restlessness. “When you're in a house for quite a long time, you can get bored of things sometimes,” he told me. “So you want to just really flip it and make it clean so you can start going in a different direction.”

Jones joined Dior Men’s in 2018 from Louis Vuitton, where he articulated a polished uniform for the young, multi-hyphenate jet set that was then only just starting to show up in men’s fashion front rows. In a watershed moment in menswear history, he put Supreme box logo tees on the Louis Vuitton runway in 2017, a groundbreaking collaboration that launched men’s fashion into the pop culture firmament and paved the way for the rise of luxury streetwear. (His LV successor, Virgil Abloh, considered Jones a mentor.)

At Dior, Jones turned the mega-collaboration into an art form—quite literally. His runway debut in 2018 revolved around a 30-foot-tall floral Kaws statue, and from there the house churned out season after season of limited-edition lines with blue chip artists like Raymond Pettibon, subcultural icons like Shawn Stüssy, next-gen fashion design talents like Eli Russell Linnetz and Tremaine Emory of Denim Tears, and triple-A-list celebrities like Travis Scott and Lewis Hamilton. Though collaborations are now status quo, in throwing open the doors of French couture’s crown jewel to such a wide swathe of cultural figures, Jones initiated a radical paradigm shift in how luxury fashion is made and who it is for.

All of which made his spit-shined finale all the more striking. On Friday, there were no hype-fueled collaborations on the runway, and hardly any Dior logos in sight. Only a few models carried handbags, which Jones deserves credit for elevating into a bona fide male status symbol.

Was this Jones hitting the reset button before his next act? Though the announcement didn’t disclose next steps, it is widely expected that Jonathan Anderson will make the leap from Loewe to Dior later this year, a major event in fashion’s silly season that has seen dozens of designers change jobs in the last six months. (On Wednesday, Diesel’s Glenn Martens was named creative director of Maison Margiela.) As for where Jones will land, I asked him last week to elaborate on where his “different direction” might be headed. The designer politely demurred. “Well, we've already started that, so…”