From counterculture to couture, the Dior Men Fall 2022 menswear collection explores the rose-tinted nostalgia surrounding the Beat Generation of the 1950s, as artistic director Kim Jones riddles it with scintillating details that merge House codes with concepts of the manic teenager.
“Beyond the glittering street was darkness,” Jack Kerouac once proffered. On Kim Jones’ sky-reaching sixteenth collection, the English artistic director for Dior Men oriented kitschy designs by the compass of the Beat Generation’s oblique concepts of the teenage experience. Doing away with the fundamentally ‘pretty’ from previous seasons, Jones employs the counterculture literary movement of the 1950s to collage a multi-dimensional mix of awe and bewilderment.
In it, the rhapsody of sensation overwhelms, as he exerts a momentum lost in the tradition of pre-collections across Europe and presents a body of work centred around storytelling. It begins as fashion reverie by the way of illustrious set and music, only to find itself billowing outward in every direction by the time the collection concludes — immediately prompting all to dissolve in it.
The Dior Men Fall 2022 collection is none like any other. It marked the first time Jones staged a show in his home country since 2003, presented as part-exhibition, part-runway at the Kensington Olympia in central London. Central to the collection’s narrative is a story that started during post-war America in 1957, with the published sophomore book from American novelist and poet, Jack Kerouac titled On the Road. The free-spirited mavericks in the novel best embody the Beat style: old-world Americana in a jazz-infused backdrop with tensions arising on youth and poetry.
It was one of the first instances of the concepts of the teenager, one we are still widely fascinated by today. These youth-driven ideas then landed in the hands of Yves Saint Laurent, the successor of Dior’s legacy after the passing of Monsieur Dior, and woven into the creation of Haute Couture’s first beatnik-inspired leather jacket named Chicago — about a key destination in Kerouac’s novel. Almost 70 years later, the story is revived with Jones who, like Kerouac, eventually travelled back to a place that felt like home.
“But you can go on thinking and imagining forever further and stop at no decisions to pick up a bag for the thinkings. Turn your thinking into your work, your thoughts a book, in sieges” — Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957
Then, as though a revelation, clothes in the collection flickered like busted neon: tightly draped jackets made way for bias-cuts checked tweed on the collection’s outerwear, while ankle-cropped pants, flashy ties and percussions of campy headpieces felt succinct to the narrative despite its offhandedness. References to On the Road were seen in pieces that mirrored 1950’s American sportswear, as well as in illustrations from the first-edition book that were hand-painted and printed onto the silk and leather of the collection.
And in a Dior first, American jeans of washed accents and worn effects were made impartial to the collection. In an instant, the rose-tinted nostalgia surrounding the literary Beat Generation was back on its feet in high fashion, as if a reincarnation of the effects felt with the controversial Yves’ leather jacket. As history repeats itself, the story has now come full circle.
As counterculture comes to mind at every interjector of the 49 looks, the hybridisation of new, modern-day elements infused into the beatnik-foundation gives rise to a Neo-futurist couture look Jones is widely known for. This warble of incoherency results in a larger than life 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.
But to truly believe in the collection, a closer look is necessary. Across the looks, Fair Isle knits were intricately embroidered with sequins in a fashion akin to Couture, reserved as a piece of knowledge only for those who truly know. Foulards silks from the 1960s were rewoven, and the graphics of a series of Dior carré scarves adorn jackets. New entries in the accessories line include climbing cordons that string across the silhouette of the Saddle bag, a careworn variation of the Dior Oblique in khaki and indigo, and classic book carriers engineered as iPhone cases.
Fall 2022 was Jones at his rawest, and most polished. It is a collection as gleefully overstuffed as it is integral to shine the way for commercial fashion. While he chose to leave behind the overtly manicured city of Paris and centred his new work around a city so tolerant to counterculture, it is instinctively clear that the collection was furthermore a reflection of his journey at Dior thus far.
When one travels overseas, their desires are forced open by new experiences, and eventually inform unfamiliar tastes and desires. From the current vantage point, returning to London has made clear the long, gradual process of transformation for the artistic director since joining the historic Maison in March 2018. Over the years, he has made subtle tweaks to the languid, serine template he fashioned in his debut collection.
But the latest collection best reiterates that Jones does not need to rely on the typical whirling glitzy experimentations to summon the divine.
Backstage Images Alfredo Piola, courtesy of Dior
Once you’re done with our breakdown of the Dior Men Fall 2022 collection, click here to catch up with our April 2022 issue!
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