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When plotting his autumn/winter 2023 Dior men’s collection, the designer Kim Jones turned to TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” — the fragmented, bitter and occasionally droll poem on postwar London that reached its centenary last December — to explore the darkest chapter of Dior’s own history: the death in 1957 of its eponymous founder, Christian Dior. Dior died of a heart attack aged 52 while on holiday in Italy just 10 years after his seismic New Look collection changed the course of fashion, following the second world war.
In turning to “The Waste Land”, Jones, who is artistic director of Dior and Fendi womenswear and couture, did not have to go far. Among the considerable collection of rare books housed in his home library in west London, most centred around the Bloomsbury Group, is a body of work and letters pertaining to Eliot. American-born Eliot kept a distance from Bloomsbury, at one point exasperatedly turning down a £500-a-year “Eliot Fellowship Fund” designed to help him give up his day job as a clerk at Lloyds bank, but he remained a great friend of Virginia Woolf’s. She and her husband Leonard published the first UK edition of “The Waste Land”, and of those 470 copies, Jones possesses three, including the Eliot “family copy” and another once owned by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, whose initials are etched in the inky-blue cover she designed for its UK release.
“I first read [“The Waste Land”] when I was doing my A-levels,” Jones recalls, leaning against a wall in that very library, wearing a striped Miu Miu shirt. Chiefly, he remembers “struggling. But I was really determined to finish it, and then reread it and understand it more”.
The centenary gave Jones occasion to dig in more deeply — but it felt timely in other ways. “If you look at what’s happening in the world at the moment, it’s not too far from what was happening 100 years ago,” he observes. “It feels more relevant 100 years later almost. But maybe I just think about it more than other people.”
Since arriving at LVMH-owned Dior in 2018, Jones has immersed himself in the archives of its founder. He says that the AW23 collection “was the first time I’ve looked at Yves Saint Laurent”, who, aged just 21, presided over the Dior ateliers for three years before being drafted to fight in the Algerian war. Jones’ AW22 show was about “celebrating 75 years of the house, and this [collection] closed that with a new chapter [on Saint Laurent]”.
Jones divided the show into five chapters, echoing the structure of the poem. On a vast screen a recording played of the actors Robert Pattinson and Gwendoline Christie reading passages of the poem, set to a score composed by Max Richter. Models walked out in Dior-ified and ultra-luxurious versions of the trench coats, white shirts and charcoal-striped trousers Eliot’s drab suburban commuters might have donned as they crossed London Bridge in 1922 “under the brown fog of a winter dawn”, with explicit nods to the shapes and leopard print of Saint Laurent’s debut Trapeze collection for Dior. These were mixed with more romantic fare — sheer vests and a soft, rounded-shoulder jacket over a tweed skirt — and the kinds of slick technical garments and accessories favoured by modern-day commuters.
“I took the rhythm and the context [of the poem], breaking apart the different chapters, to create the show,” he says. “I thought about what the poem evokes. What the person might be wearing. And the water. That feeling, of the movement and rhythm of poetry — that’s where it started.”
Did he feel the need to make “The Waste Land” more uplifting? “I think you can take something that’s quite moody, and make it quite elegant without it being depressing.”
Jones, who credits his love of books to his Danish mother — “a big reader” who set up university libraries across Africa — says he’s found more inspiration in literature since the pandemic. “I was stuck in this room the whole of lockdown, pretty much,” he says, gesturing to the bookshelves and the Lucien Freud paintings hung on either side. “Normally for a lot of collections I [first] go out and look at something — but I was going to books,” he says of finding inspiration.
Hence, he alighted on Woolf’s Orlando for his spring 2021 couture collection for Fendi. He says he’s “already thinking” about how he’ll interpret the novel for Dior for the book’s 100th anniversary in 2028. Among the prizes of his book collection is an inscribed copy of Orlando that once belonged to Vita Sackville-West, the novel’s muse.
It, and many of the other Bloomsbury-related books, ceramics and art on Jones’ shelves will soon be housed in a new facility in the East Sussex village of Rodmell, where the Woolfs had a country retreat. He has bought the former primary school, which closed in 2018, and, together with the Charleston Trust, is turning it into a research centre. “[Bloomsbury] is something that’s inspired me my whole life, creatively,” says Jones, who spent his teenage years nearby. “People can visit Monk’s House [the Woolf’s former residence, now a National Trust museum] and see [the school] as well. I bought a massive collection the other day, of 700 books or so, for it.”
Will he miss living among his things? “I’ve got a few years yet,” he says, noncommittally. It’s hard to imagine he won’t.
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