Kim Jones finally returns to his hometown – London!
Arriving at the Fall 2022 collection, Dior Men brings 49 looks that overall feel quite different from the past, in terms of individual pieces, colors, prints, textures, styles, and the “venue.” On this season’s invitation, you can vaguely see a CD inscribed with the words “Christian Dior” and “1947”: the former needs no introduction; the latter is the year when Mr. Christian Dior created the legendary New Look and held his first fashion show. However, what is the significance of “Jack Kerouac” and “On The Road” written on that CD? This is related to this year’s “venue.”
The venue last night, with its extremely dark setting, felt like a return to the Fall 2019 season presentation; interestingly, the catwalk was covered with a giant scroll of a book, but what exactly is that giant scroll covered in printed font? What is the connection between Jack Kerouac and this scroll?
In fact, that giant scroll is the content of the classic work “On The Road” by American writer Jack Kerouac.
Born in 1922, Jack Kerouac had no strong literary background or foundation growing up. He entered the prestigious Columbia University on a football scholarship, but dropped out in his sophomore year to pursue a lifetime dedicated to literary writing. In college, Jack Kerouac met a group of diverse writer classmates and good friends, which planted the seed of his love for creative writing, leading him to leave campus and head to the jazz mecca of New York. At the time just a young man in his twenties, the dropout Jack Kerouac briefly joined the U.S. Navy when World War II broke out, but was discharged due to mental illness. He then traveled around the United States, eventually arriving in New York where he was drawn to the local underground bar culture, spending his days lingering in underground bars and mingling with some black jazz musicians, encountering the Bebop music that would change his life forever.
Bebop music is a bold challenge to the traditional jazz music style, with musicians improvising without sheet music, deeply influencing Jack Kerouac to apply this subversive approach to his writing, overturning traditional poetic norms. Spending days and nights in Bebop bars and among musicians, Jack Keouac became immersed in the world of writing, eventually establishing a creative rhythm in the 1950s that embraced counterculture, materialism, primitive emotions, and natural living, embodying the spirit of the Beat Generation. Immersed in the performances of Bebop musicians, his desire to write became unstoppable, leading the travel-loving Jack Kerouac to tirelessly complete his iconic work “On the Road” – a 120-foot long scroll – while crossing various states in America, unwilling to interrupt his writing, much like the “catwalk” featured in the Dior Men’s Fall 2022 collection last night.
Regarding the 1957 publication of “On The Road,” the story is chaotic, without a solid structure, and promotes falling, getting lost, crime, drugs, and sex. However, it has become a literary classic many years later. The reason is simple, because “On The Road” reflects the wild life of the “beat generation,” symbolizing their pursuit of spiritual, mental, and sexual philosophy through escaping the city, indulging in physical pleasures on the road. Growing up, Kim Jones has always traveled with his father, a hydrogeologist, even spending his childhood in African regions. As a fashion designer, he travels to various countries for inspiration, sharing a similar background with the protagonist Sal Paradise in “On The Road.” Sal Paradise’s greatest inspiration in the story comes from his road trips, leading him through a journey of renewal, wonder, and crossing boundaries, transitioning from the “old self” to the “new self,” bidding farewell to the mundane years of self-forgetfulness.
This season in Fall 2022, instead of collaborating with today’s hall-of-fame artists or friends in the industry, Kim Jones references Jack Kerouac and his iconic work “On The Road.” By celebrating the writer who shook the literary world and subverted writing imagination, Kim Jones aims to echo the way Christian Dior revolutionized the fashion industry in 1947. Even though the book was published a decade after the legendary New Look (1957), it still evokes memories for Kim Jones and the fashion world at that time, reminiscent of Dior’s groundbreaking debut a decade earlier. As 2021 comes to a close, Kim Jones also wants to share some personal deep feelings, returning to his hometown to conclude for Dior Men, using this connection to make everyone rethink the meaning of overturning tradition, making this storytelling approach particularly intriguing.
資料及圖片來源：Courtesy of Dior Men ; The World ; Web photo
