Monsieur Jones

Designer KIM JONES has amassed a street wear archive, reinvigorated the suit, and engineered a few legendary collaborations. Now, more than a year into his term at Dior, he’s working on his grandest project yet.

- Thom Bettridge

ONE BLOCK NORTH OF THE ARC DE TRIOMPHE, past a neoclassical entranceway, up a spiral staircase, and through a pair of double doors, models circle in and out of a salon, sometimes in runway-grade outfits, sometimes in nothing but short black robes with a stately “DIOR” emblazoned on the back. At the rear of the room, within a tighter orbit of staff, the artistic director of Dior Men sits alone at the dead center of an American Idol–Esque judges table. “You get a headache from being under these lights for so long,” Kim Jones mumbles, asking someone for an aspirin. Seventy-two hours out from his highly anticipated summer 2020 menswear presentation, the British designer is taking a final pass at the entire collection. A photo studio is set up on the opposite side of the salon, each look photographed and pinned to a board next to the designer. Slouched yet alert, the 39-year-old Jones is dressed like a modern-day Medici on his way to the bodega: dark T-shirt, fat diamond necklace, and tailored jogging pants that taper down into a pair of deconstructed blue Air Jordans designed by his friend Virgil Abloh. “What we’re stressing out about today is finding all the models,” design director Lucy Beeden tells me. “Because Kim wants an army of 49 boys and he doesn’t like changes when we’ve got delicate fabrics like this.”