The Dior Men Fall 2022 Collection Is A Study On Youth Culture - Men's Folio
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The Dior Men Fall 2022 Collection Is A Study On Youth Culture

  • By Manfred Lu

The Dior Men Fall 2022 Collection Is A Study On Youth Culture
Presenting in his hometown, London, Kim Jones dives into the rich counter-culture history of the city and back to his starting point for the Dior Men Fall 2022 collection. 

The last time we heard from Kim Jones, he was in Milan putting together what might have been the collaboration of the century at the Fendi and Versace crossover. There, presenting together with Donatella Versace, he contemplated ideals of where the history and influence of both brands with rich ties to the 1980s have in place for the generation of today.
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This obsession with youth culture extended on Thursday, where Jones surprised everyone again by bringing Dior to his hometown of London in a post-Covid rarity of a live presentation filled with audience at Kensington Olympia. There, an 80-meter-long facsimile of “On the Road”, a scroll-of-sorts with texts from Jack Kerouac (American novelist and poet, and pioneer of the Beat Generation), narrates this new entry to his story at Dior.
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The Dior Men Fall 2022 Collection Is A Study On Youth Culture

Bias-cut checked tweed jackets and coats, wool ankle-cropped pants, flashy ties and cinched waist silhouettes feels immediate and succinct to the narrative. Nearly every look from the collection presented itself as both studies of subculture counterculture, and primarily, resonates the wondrous styles from the Beat Generation of the 1950s, and the history of Dior all together at once. This warble of incoherency in fashion history presents a larger, fictional tale of what menswear dressing means to us all today — which Jones and his provocateurs in menswear have helped mature and navigate as an avenue in fashion that remains equally as important as womenswear today. 

The artistic director has gravitated towards countless collections that stuns and seduce at Dior Men, and is best known for demonstrating an interest towards anything, and everything that is straightforwardly pretty — as though the work of fashion is art itself. Dior Men Fall 2022 was absent of these ideals, or at least just on its surface. It comes completely natural that his collection inspired by the English draws him back to his roots.
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Look 4:
The influence of the Beat Generation is religiously studied with the bias-cut checked tweed jacket, skinny tie, and checkerboard-weaved shirt.
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Look 6: Yet, the same ideals are transfixed into the modern era, with a modern oversized-duster coat and white-tee pairing each Dior Men by Kim Jones collection is not shy of.
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Look 12:
Glamour from the Parisan perspective have now been influenced by subculture styling — with the introduction of a new embellished swimwear-life headpieces that’s both futuristic yet retro, making it completely surreal.
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Look 18:
Never would anyone expect denim at Dior Men worn the way people would actually wear it.
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Look 24:
No emphasis on British subculture is complete without a leather jacket. Here, it is reimagined in a midnight blue with a polished effect.
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When one travels overseas, their desires are forced open by new experiences, and thus informs new tastes and endeavours. Jones brought back what he learnt from Paris, with the overtly plastered and manicured take on fashion, with the London people often forget — It’s rich history of counter-culture that seeps into the rustic, the old, the mundane. It immediately becomes fresh, unpretentious, and naturally multi-dimensional.

While Fall 2022 is filled with the most tactile production from Jones’ career at Dior Men—streamlined silhouettes and percussions of headpieces that orchestrates rebelliousness and wonder— the collection is nonetheless a return to his founding, and ultimately why his hire at Dior was widely anticipated and celebrated. Polished yet raw as best presented in the prints and colours, profound but never convoluted as the Kerouac narrative anchors the work, these are quiet revelation that proves that Jones does not need to rely on his typical whirling glitzy experimentations to summon the divine.

Once you’re done with our review of the Dior Men Fall 2022 show, click here to catch up with our December/January 2022 issue.