For someone who likes to watch Family Guy in his downtime, the Dior menswear designer Kim Jones is not afraid of a highbrow reference. The starting point for the autumn/winter 2024 collection was the rarefied world of ballet.
The show took place in an enormous purpose-built hangar in the grounds of the École Militaire complex, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Paris, on Friday. The stark winter sunshine gave way to the darkness inside as guests sat underneath a ceiling salted with stars.
Theatrical staging was met with a suitably dramatic soundtrack – a “revisiting” of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s music from the ballet Romeo and Juliet, courtesy of modern day composer Max Richter. Bernard Arnault, the founder, chair and chief executive of LVMH, the luxury behemoth that owns Dior, could be seen straight-faced but tapping his toe.
Jones had been thinking about the relationship between Christian Dior and Margot Fonteyn, who discovered the house of Dior on a trip to Paris in 1948. But for more classical menswear inspiration, Jones turned to Fonteyn’s most famous dance partner, Rudolf Nureyev.
There is a family connection: Jones’s uncle was the ballet dancer and photographer Colin Jones, whose pictures of Nureyev, driving, reading, chatting on the phone, as well as dancing, formed a book left on each seat.
There were 40 ready-to-wear looks and 20 couture – the first time Jones has ventured into that uber-luxe, labour-intensive world. According to the show notes, through the idea of the Russian ballet dancer’s personal life and onstage persona, Jones explored an “idea of two lives lived … the world of the couture reflects the extravagance of his stage presence, of Nureyev’s flamboyance, insolence and elegance”.
The more extravagant looks, which will surely be a red-carpet hit with some of Hollywood’s more interesting dressers, involved cream tunics embellished with beads; sheer, metallic mesh tops worn with louchely tailored trousers and overcoats with crystal embellishments stitched around the waist like shoals of sardines.
There was tailoring, single-breasted and slightly flared; leather outerwear – Jones took his post-show lap of honour, stopping to hug the fellow LVMH designer Pharrell Williams on the front row, wearing a leather jacket – and Nureyev’s off-duty 70s style of zip-up suits was replicated in zipped wool jumpsuits.
On more than one model’s earlobe was evidence that the trend for pearl earrings is going nowhere fast. While lapels were worn with one side flattened, the other popped.
A very of-the-moment, quiet-luxury palette of mushrooms, cappuccino-browns, greys and burgundy was given pizzazz thanks to pops of WKD-blue, primary yellow and Sprite-green, either via pulled-up socks worn with Mary Jane-style trainers – surely a cult item come warmer weather – or thanks to leather bags.
Dior’s famed cannage stitching, a geometrical pattern of braiding that was inspired by a chair that belonged to Napoleon and has been used by the house since it was founded in 1947, turned up on handbags and bumbags.
Nureyev is an interesting muse, known for his powerful dancing style and sex appeal, as well as his temper. He once apparently shouted at Fonteyn: “Shit, shit, you dance like shit.”
He was androgynous at a time when Russian male dancers were typically “strong, solid, cylindrical fellows”, according to a New Yorker review of a 2007 biography.
Clothes clearly mattered to Nureyev, who died in 1993 at the age of 54, and who once apparently ditched his costume mid-rehearsal because he thought it made his legs look short.
He may well have enjoyed Dior’s latest collection. When he first encountered ballet costumes as a child in the Soviet Union, he “would fondle them for hours, smooth them and smell them … I was like a dope addict,” he later recalled.
The kimonos may have inspired particular ardour – the silver uchikake kimono was based on one Nureyev – a collector of vintage textiles – owned. It apparently took 10 craftspeople in Japan three months to complete.
The craftsmanship matched the spectacle. From a designer who previously held a show backdropped by the Great Pyramid of Giza, an afternoon at the ballet made a perfect move.
