STORIES OF FUTURE PAST

Dior unveils a grand narrative of time in its Men’s Fall 2023 presentation and the Dior Tears capsule collaboration with guest designer Tremaine Emory

- JONATN HO

AMIDST A BACKDROP of the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the World, Kim Jones marked the 75th year since Christian Dior’s inception of the brand with an equal number of looks. “My interest in ancient Egypt is about the stars and the sky. It’s that fascination with the ancient world and the parallels with what we look at today; what we inherited from them and what we are still learning from the past. It links to Christian Dior in that sense and by way of his fascination with symbols and superstitions that recur throughout his life and work, one of which is the star. In both the collection and the show there is an idea of ‘guided by the stars’ and what that can entail in many ways. It’s about how the past shapes the future or an idea of the future from the past,” says Jones.

Indeed, it was here at the foot of the Pyramids of Giza, each with an exact astronomical orientation and flat sides matching compass points, that the Artistic Director of Dior Men presented his autumn collection, part of the continuum of past, present and future at Dior. An analogy of time as he contrasts an ancient civilisation plotting the truth of our stars that we today observe via NASA’s telescopes, the principles and rigour of the Dior archive past and the men’s atelier present, that are now presented in full glory with a practised focus on pattern cutting.