Kim Jones Takes Dior Men, ERL Collaboration on the Road, With Pop-ups Planned Worldwide

 

 

Kim Jones is taking his California dream on the road with a series of pop-ups worldwide that will showcase the Dior Men’s 2023 resort collection, a glittering rainbow of a collaboration with Eli Russell Linnetz’s ERL.

The first shop will open Thursday at Dover Street Market in London, with a party hosted by Jones. The DSM pop-up runs until Jan. 19, with others opening in the meantime.

The largest-scale shop will pop at Dior’s Los Angeles Melrose temporary space, and run from Jan. 12 to Feb. 12. Other retail installations are planned for Japan, Korea, Thailand and China from January until the end of March.

There will be two pop-ups in China, one at the Sanya Edition Hotel, which runs beginning Saturday until the end of March, and the other at the new Shaghai shopping mall, Zhangyuan, from Thursday until mid-February.

In November, for the holiday season, Dior transformed a courtyard at Zhangyuan into a dreamlike garden, with a giant illuminated compass rose sculpture. Inside the pop-up, there was a café and a selection of men’s and women’s clothing and accessories.

 

The Dior Men’s ERL collaboration debuted in May in Venice, California, on an ocean blue runway set with waves cresting on either side and leading straight to the beach. Guests included Kid Cudi, Winnie Harlow, Brooklyn Beckham and Tommy Hilfiger.

The evening’s runway was awash in pink corduroy; sexy, sheer mohair sweaters; cresting wave crystal and shell embroidery, and tinsel on pullover sweaters, bags and tube socks.

“The way of dressing in California has a huge influence on how people around the world dress,” Jones said at the time. “It’s relaxed, it’s about comfort and outdoor life. There’s a certain dress-up to this collection, but it’s not in the classic formal sense, it’s through rich fabrications…it’s almost eveningwear.”

 

Jones said he chose to work with Linnetz and ERL because he admired his work and wanted somebody to look at Dior from a different angle.

The Dior Men’s artistic director said “working with a younger designer on Dior Men and seeing things from his perspective felt incredibly inspiring. It was both familiar and revelatory; reaffirming why we both dreamed about working in fashion in the first place.”

Linnetz, a native Californian whose collections are a dreamy mix of macaron pastels, bold colors and shimmer, said that he and Jones took a close look at Gianfranco Ferré’s years at Dior and channeled that sense of maximalism.

He said that throughout the collection, there is “a collision of moments in time and history,” and a cross-generational feel.