How Kim Jones Engineers Hype at Dior Men

Dior Men artistic director Kim Jones has turned the revered French house into a platform for artists and designers from outside the high-fashion world, honing his new vision for luxury with names like Air Jordan, KAWS, and Stüssy. His latest goes even further, as he hands the keys of the Dior atelier over to an emergent design sensation named Eli Russell Linnetz.

August 18, 2022

All clothing and accessories (throughout) by Dior Men.

It’s a sunny afternoon in May, and the fashion designer Eli Russell Linnetz is sitting in a hotel ballroom in Santa Monica. Linnetz runs his brand, ERL, out of a studio a few miles away in his hometown of Venice Beach, where he is currently working with a team of two employees, one of whom is his sister. Today, he’s surrounded by a half-dozen French staffers from Christian Dior, who are awaiting further direction. Wearing a vintage slime-green Ocean Pacific shirt, camo cargo pants, and goggle eyeglass frames, Linnetz looks a bit like the kooky intern who should be steaming a rack of shimmering suit jackets nearby. But owing to an act of creative audacity by Dior Men artistic director Kim Jones, who is tapping away on his phone nearby, Linnetz is instead commanding the room.

Linnetz, 31, isn’t your typical fashion school alum on the come up. A former opera singer and child actor—he voiced Tipo in the millennial touchstone The Emperor’s New Groove—who studied screenwriting in college, Linnetz spent most of his 20s as a buzzy creative director and photographer for the likes of Kanye West and Lady Gaga. He launched ERL in 2018 at the urging of Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market president Adrian Joffe, who saw in Linnetz a quintessentially modern talent. With the backing of Dover Street’s young designer incubator, ERL’s nostalgia-soaked reinterpretations of Cali-jock staples like jorts and football jerseys took off quickly. And ultimately led to his being tapped to guest design the Dior Men spring 2023 collection.

Jacket, $3,200. Shirt, $1,100. Tie (price upon request). Hat, (price upon request). Necklace, $1,850. Brooch, $980.
Cardigan, $1,750. Pants (price upon request). Boxer shorts, $790. Sneakers, $2,300. Necklace, $1,850. Rings, $910 for set.

The call that sealed the partnership lasted less than a minute, according to Linnetz. “I feel like a lot of people, with the success of ERL, have said, ‘Oh, we should work together,’ but that’s gone nowhere,” he says. “We’d be having conversations for two years. And with Kim, we had one 45-second conversation and he made up his mind.”

“I don’t like to mull things over too much,” Jones adds. “I don’t need to have a long conversation about something. I kind of just do it.”

Still, Linnetz is aware of the momentousness of the occasion that’s brought him into Dior’s elaborate operation. “Dior’s never had a guest designer in their history, so it’s actually insane,” Linnetz says as he shows off a board with the final looks styled on models. One wears a thick purple turtleneck embroidered with the phrase “California Couture,” another, a crisp gray suit with the lining flipped inside-out. In a first for Dior, two hoodies would grace the runway too. Based on ERL designs worn by the likes of Justin Bieber and Kendall Jenner, they are covered in waves of silver sequins and will cost over $5,000 when the collection hits stores in January, says Linnetz. “I feel like a lot of people try to tap into skate culture because it’s relevant. But this is actually just what I wear every day. Even the skater chain,” he says, holding up an enormous gold chain studded with “Christian Dior” charms that’s clamped to his cargos. “They’re just abstracted luxurious versions of stuff that I already wear.” (Linnetz’s success as a designer hasn’t slowed down his photography practice; he shot Jacob Elordi for the cover of this very issue of GQ.)

The partnership may be somewhat radical in the history of the maison, but it’s just another day at the office for Jones, who has made collaboration a cornerstone of his tenure at Dior. His debut show, spring 2019, included a partnership with the Pop artist KAWS, and from there Jones constructed collections around the work of Raymond Pettibon, Daniel Arsham, Kenny Scharf, Peter Doig, and other blue-chip artists. He’s also released collaborations with Rimowa, Birkenstock, Travis Scott, and Air Jordan Brand, the latter of which resulted in arguably the most highly anticipated sneaker drop in human history. “From our perspective, Dior has been an unequivocal roaring success since Kim took over,” says Sam Lobban, the EVP GMM of apparel and designer at Nordstrom, which hosted a pop-up shop selling exclusive Dior x KAWS pieces and runway looks from Jones’s first show for the house. Dior doesn’t disclose sales numbers, but Lobban witnessed the potency of Jones’s vision firsthand: Every single piece Nordstrom stocked flew off the shelves.

Jones is certainly not the only designer to harness collaborations to generate reality-warping levels of demand. But he brings a new level of ambition and taste to the endeavor. In 2017, while at the helm of Louis Vuitton, he put a wrecking ball through the wall separating streetwear and luxury fashion to release a capsule with Supreme. At the time, some of the industry’s snobbier characters viewed it as sacrilegious for one of Paris’s most storied luxury houses to partner with an attitudinal downtown NYC skate shop. But as the blocks-long lines that formed outside of the eight Supreme x Louis Vuitton pop-up shops around the globe suggested, Jones was seeing a reality of commercial fashion that others weren’t ready to embrace.

“Kim is really connected to the youth and the culture and what people want,” says 20-year-old model and designer Kailand Morris, who interned for Jones at Dior a few years ago. “He’s a really good listener as far as what the youth is looking at right now, or what they will want to have in the near future.”

Shirt, $2,000. Jeans, $1,400. Sneakers, $1,750.

Jones sharpened his Spidey sense for hype at a young age. As a kid, he grew up between England, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Botswana, following his father’s work as a hydrologist wherever it took them. But where he really wanted to live was California, a place he constantly returns to and references in his work. “It was the dream,” Jones says. Part of the appeal was the glossiness of the place he saw in movies. But his yearning was also material in nature. “They had the best Star Wars toys,” Jones recalls. While corresponding with a pen pal from California, Jones recognized the difference in quality—and therefore desirability—between the toys he had access to and those across the pond. “I was just like, Why don’t I have that Death Star?”

In 1993, a 14-year-old Jones started hanging around the pioneering London streetwear distributor Gimme 5, and through a friend was able to buy early Stüssy and Supreme pieces at wholesale cost. The feeling of discovering that fresh, new garment that nobody else could get animates him to this day—and informs who he wants to work with. “I have so much respect for those people,” Jones says. “Then you see younger people like Eli doing their stuff, and it reminds you of that.”

After receiving a formal fashion education at Central Saint Martins, Jones launched a namesake line and began consulting for heritage British labels that were trying to modernize their image. He was the perfect candidate: a classically trained menswear designer who could fuse an obsession with art, fashion, and music—the building blocks of today’s fashion economy—into commercially successful clothing. “He was a sneakerhead, but he was also totally into books and the Bloomsbury Group,” says the painter Peter Doig, who worked with Jones on the winter 2021–2022 Dior Men collection. “He’s multi-versed, really, in a natural way. When you go to his house, you see things on his walls that you wouldn’t expect to see. I thought he would’ve had much more popular taste than he actually has, you know? But he can see the popular in things that aren’t popular.”

Jones is now one of the most prolific fashion designers in the world. In 2015, when Raf Simons quit the top job at Christian Dior, he hinted that a work-life imbalance was to blame. He designed six collections a year for Dior, and two for his own brand. At Dior, Jones designs around 10 collections every year. Chief among them are the two seasonal runway shows in Paris, preceded by two pre-collections that are unveiled in far-flung locations like Tokyo and Miami, all of which generally include some 50 looks made up of hundreds of new products. Scattered in between are drops that most people might not notice but are instrumental in keeping Dior’s 500-some stores stocked with new clothes, bags, and sneakers week after week: ski collections, Lunar New Year collections, beach collections, and updates to permanent lines. And that’s in addition to the 10 collections Jones designs per year for Fendi, where he serves as the artistic director of womenswear and couture.

Shirt, $750. Tie, $320.
Coat (price upon request). Jacket, $5,300. Shirt, $750. Pants, $1,750. Sneakers, $2,300. Tie, $320.

Jones explains this intense responsibility as a simple equation of supply and demand in the world. “The appetite for people consuming now is massive, and they want to find new stuff all the time,” he says.

Jones’s collaborative process, then, is both natural to his omnivorous cultural interests and a practical response to the demands of designing about 20 collections a year. He brings in friends to lend their talents to his ever-expanding output. Within each Dior collection is hardware designed by Alyx founder and Givenchy creative director Matthew M. Williams, jewelry designed by Yoon Ahn of Ambush, and shoes designed by French footwear specialist Thibo Denis, all of whom are incredibly adept at charming the streetwear generation.

His hard-core devotion to the history of art and fashion, meanwhile, helps Jones pull off partnerships that elicit genuine surprise and delight season in and season out. He has an archive of clothes made by early punk designers from London like Judy Blame and Christopher Nemeth, and he purchases large swaths of new Miu Miu collections. As Shawn Stüssy puts it: “Kim gets it.” Stüssy, the semi-reclusive designer and artist who walked away from the fashion business in 1996, collaborated with Jones for Dior Men prefall 2020. Jones didn’t lure him back with a sack full of cash but rather by a sense that he was a responsible steward of the cultural history they would be reviving on the runway together. “History is very important, in my opinion,” Stüssy says. “You need to know where you came from to get to the next stop. Only a student of their cultural past can find the current flavor.”

Shorts, $9,300. Sneakers, $1,750. Socks (price upon request).
Shirt, $2,400. Necklace, $1,150. Bracelet, $920.

The next day in L.A., several hundred guests of Dior enter a blocked-off portion of Windward Ave in downtown Venice. The asphalt, which serves as the runway, is painted bright blue, and stadium seating fills the sidewalks on either side in front of Mexican restaurants and thrift stores that have been closed for the show. Legends like Kid Cudi and Tony Hawk arrive to cheers from dozens of locals and tourists gathered on adjacent streets and rooftops.

With rain threatening, a My Bloody Valentine track kicks on and the show begins. Out come the skate shoes and inside-out suits, a shirt and shorts covered in a newsprint pattern flipped from Dior’s Galliano era, puffer jackets quilted with the house’s iconic cannage pattern, and acid-washed jeans straight out of Lords of Dogtown. The stuff that Linnetz and his Venice Beach buddies wear every day, remixed by a couture house.

Like the best Dior Men collections, it represented a cohesive story, and was stuffed with pieces that will have new and old Dior customers opening their wallets. I’d bet those glittering hoodies in particular will inspire many fervent moments in Dior stores: They represent a perfect alchemy between the savoir faire of Dior with a hype idea of the moment, an alchemy that has a way of stoking intense levels of obsession. “It was interesting to do a lot of the language I’ve already created,” Linnetz says of the hoodies. “But Kim has such a bigger understanding of luxury and storytelling and the experience of people when they go shopping. So he was like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to just do another color of something you already do. What’s the Dior version? What can we do with our atelier that tells your story in a new way?’ And it’s not about just repeating something. It’s taking something that has some truth or connection to the zeitgeist and manifesting that for a different audience.”

It’s easy to miss the quiet significance of what Jones has built at Dior. In mastering the relentless pace of the modern fashion industry, he’s become a beacon for creativity and collaboration (and, yes, commercialism).

Back at the hotel the day before the show, I asked Jones about putting hoodies in a Dior show for the first time. “I would never put a hoodie on the runway, because for me that’s not Dior,” he said. But his process opens his mind to new possibilities and new opportunities for discovery, even if that discovery is a $5,000-plus hoodie. When the idea came up, Jones followed his well-honed instincts. He certainly didn’t have time to stop and fret over the decision; his next Dior show, in Paris, was only a month away. “I was like, ‘Fine,’ ” he said. “I didn’t think about it because I didn’t have an issue with it. So it goes.”

Samuel Hine is GQ’s fashion writer.

A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of GQ with the title “The Alchemy of Hype”.

PRODUCTIONS CREDITS:Photographs by Eli Russell LinnetzStyled by Rene Lou PadoraGrooming by Christine Nelli using Dior Beauty and R+Co Hair Care Set design by James M. Rene Produced by Jonathan Bossle at Tightrope Production

 https://www.gq.com/story/kim-jones-eli-russell-linnetz-dior-men 

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