Kim Jones' next artistic link-up for Dior will be with Kenny Scharf

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Nov 28, 2020

Christian Dior’s menswear creative director Kim Jones, an inveterate fan of collaborations with fine artists, has a new design teammate for his next Dior collection, legendary New York street artist Kenny Scharf.

As noted, Dior will unveil its next menswear collection pre-fall 2021 online on December 8, and simultaneously in a presentation with Chinese notables in Beijing, featuring the first examples of Scharf’s contributions.

The link-up with Scharf marks the latest time Jones has worked with an important contemporary artist. For his debut show and collection for the house, Jones teamed up with hipster artist Kaws, who composed a giant floral statue of a canine cartoon inside a cavalry regiment’s barracks in Paris, while last June he had a set designed by artist Daniel Arsham.

Two years ago in Tokyo, for Dior’s first pre-fall 2019 runway show, Jones commissioned artist Hajime Sorayama to build a giant 12-meter-high robot warrior lady. This time last year, for his Dior show during Miami's Art Basel in December 2019, Jones incorporated black and white graphics by artist Shawn Stussy into the collection with great effect.

Teaming up with Scharf in effect maintains a rich tradition that respects the DNA of the house, since the founder Monsieur Dior, prior to becoming a couturier, was a gallery owner who showed works by the likes of Picasso, Dali and Magritte.

“Combining pop culture, street art and science fiction with an instantly recognizable aesthetic, the American artist – an emblematic figure of the '80s East Village scene, alongside his peers Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat – creates works populated by brightly colored creatures, a joyful universe influenced in particular by cartoons and surrealism, playing on the distortion of forms and spaces,” Dior noted in a release.

Los Angeles-born Scharf was a key figure in the '80s New York underground art scene, sharing a Times Square apartment with Haring and staging seminal light and art installations at disco parties and works of performance art.

Scharf is not a novice when it comes to fashion, having collaborated with everyone from Diane von Furstenberg and Fendi to Jeremy Scott and, more recently, Heron Preston.