Dior Menswear SS2025: How to be a Modern Man

Kim Jones has been vocal about his admiration for the British novelist Virginia Woolf, and he has also regularly expressed his admiration for the Bloomsbury Group, while the SS23 collection was dedicated to Duncan Grant, another member of the group and long-term life partner of the artist Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's older sister, as well as their home and garden, Charleston Farmhouse. Kim Jones is also a great connoisseur and collector of ceramics and pottery objects, especially the ones made by the Bloomsbury Group artists. How is all of this related to the current Dior menswear SS2025 collection? Here's how: his love for pottery brought Jones to South Africa to visit the artist Hylton Nel, who works with ceramics — and Nel made the setup for the SS2025 show, enlarging his famous dogs and cats to gigantic sizes, also in a very British style of absurdist humor, and his kitties reclining like odalisques and the doggies drawing with pencils ironically fully correlated with the clichés of Victorian comfort.

The collection itself had no strong direct connection to all this, but the same motifs appeared on detachable collars worn over trapeze coats or were used for voluminous turtleneck sweaters. But how confidently and subtly all this was done — the essential Kim Jones tailoring in the form of trousers or shorts with jackets and long or shorter loose coats, repeating the shape of traditional classics, but with a remarkable change in proportions, or suddenly turning into a hybrid of a trench and a cape. And they were accompanied by heavy boots with riveted toes reminiscent of clogs or work boots with socks covered in those same kitties and doggies. Bright cardigans or short, tight-fitting sleeveless vests with swallow-shaped brooches along the clasp and wonderful hats, like the crocheted beach ones with some kind of beads and pearls along the edge (created by South African artisans), designed, of course, by Stephen Jones. But it’s not even about the individual ideas, but how well it all worked together, turning into an exemplary modern fashion collection.

The show’s refrain was the phrase “Dior for all my friends” printed on the défilé’s invitations, and these words truly captured the essence of what Kim Jones does, as well as the essence of what makes him one of the best, if not the best, contemporary men's designers.

There was absolutely nothing extravagant in this collection, nothing super flamboyant or flashy, like, for example, in the collection of this summer or even in the collection of the coming autumn, where there were quite eccentric things, such as the long lavish robes. This time, Kim Jones didn’t even get particularly carried away with his favorite ribbons, slings, and other flying elements and dispensed with any gender fluidity (even if the pants with pleats were based on the womenswear sketches from Dior archive). He focused all of his attention on the game with proportions, when the fairly wide, but not very long shorts touchingly reveal the knees, and the quite fitted sleeveless vests worn with them dramatically bare the biceps, when the clearly supposed to be wide and long raincoat is suddenly cut off even shorter than the shorts worn with it -— and the entire collection was full of such counterpoints. The result is a unimprovable wardrobe for a modern man, consisting of completely understandable and even traditional elements — trousers, shorts, jackets, raincoats — but devoid of any traditional stereotypes of masculinity. Clothes for all my friends.

Courtesy: Dior

Text: Elena Stafyeva