Dior Homme by Kris Van Assche

[Diorling]

Diamond earrings!?! No way! I will not have a man wearing diamond studs dress me, if I wanted that, I would wear Phat Farm.

 

[ETROsexualJ]

Horrible images of puff daddy in dior homme suddenly popped up.

Yah; but, KVA is a hottie and it works becuase he isn't a "white" (American) boy.

 

[Spike413]

Diamond earrings!?! No way! I will not have a man wearing diamond studs dress me, if I wanted that, I would wear Phat Farm.

See, now I gave you karma for your last comment, and then read this one.

You're just too clever Diorling.

Seriously though, I doubt Dior Homme will ever be able to duplicate the success and resonance of the days under Hedi. It was really a case of being the right "thing" at the right time with him. His p-o-v struck a chord with the alternatively fashionable male.

Lately it's been pure cheese though, all geared to the wannabe cool hipster clientele, and ultimately that's what's gonna sell. I don't think it matters who is designing for DH, I can't see it packing that punch of Hedi's unpretentious glory days.

 

[just_me]

DH was pretentious, I mean.. $300 for a 'follow me' tee.. it's absolute rubbish.

And I have noot seen any swoon worthy jackets since his first collection just bland copies.

 

[belletrist]

Dior Homme prices were below every other menswear designers (at least for the "small" pieces and and even some "big" pieces - trenches- were below 1K *eur*), and much below every womenwear's (just check the prices of a Chloe jean...)

 

[Diorling]

^ Dior Homme isn't particularly expensive in the world of mens ready to wear, Id say it is about middle of all brands at at the lower end of most designer houses. I mean, 1500 for a trench isn't bad when it's 2k at Fendi and 3k at Burberry Prorsum.

 

[Lena]

please let's avoid turning this discussion to just another DH shopping thread

if you need to discuss DH pricing etc, please try the DH discussion at shop-till-u-drop forum, appreciated

 

[fashionken]

I find it amusing how it's been weeks since the announcement of Assche's hiring as the new Creative Director and yet this thread has only managed to get three pages worth of replies. Compare it to the other Dior Homme threads.

Nobody cares about Assche, nobody cares about Dior Homme anymore. Slimane had to go (no, really, he did) but hiring Assche is just ridiculous. The man is simply a dull designer (on so many levels). I've always found his things very forced and depressingly sellable and mainstream.

What Assche does is not fashion. It goes next to labels like Hugo Boss and Brioni, which never seem to get over the plain convention of the suit. Today, designers - and especially menswear designers - simply must think along the lines of developing and changing the superficial conventions which apply to genders. That's what Slimane did, it's what Galliano does, and Gaultier, Pugh, Braganza and many more ground-breaking designers like them.

Working with the periphery of the suit and keeping the silhouette of the suit season upon season may have been fashion from 1900 until 1990 but it is not fashion anymore and hence the designs of Assche should not be regarded as such. I cannot count the times I've wanted to scream at the screen when I've researched menswear on Catwalking.com. There are too many designers out there who can't get passed the idea of the suit. Boring is what it is.

 

[ilaughead]

^You're exactly right, fashionken!

 

[MUXU]

KVA is perfect for dior homme. they are both after the same thing. much easier for LVMH to deal with than the vision hardcore slimane.

like diorling said...dior is dead.
im glad that slimane left. it really is the right time to start out fresh again.

 

[MJCouture]

I think we should really all bite our tounges to see what he really produces. Lets face it, Hedi's look has become VERY easy to copy. He hasn't even done anything that good in a few years, so if KVA just knocks Hedi's good stuff off (which I am sure is what LVMH is going to mandate) then it will be no worse than what Hedi was heading towards anyway. Even though Slimane invented what DH is and stands for, he was always a poor fit for me. In fact Dior Homme should not exist as it does. It is a horrible branding mix up on Dior's part, it does not even consider what the house was built on and what the women's wear is and has been. This may be a march into actually putting someone who belongs at DIOR in the DH spot, even if he does not really stand for the same things that Hedi does. It could be interesting to see how he gets inspired now that he is working off a house with a (be it short) history that people are really, really watching. His own line has never been very interesting, and I always thought he had a lot of hype surrounding his name, but this might work and I am going to reserve judgement until the first pictures come.

 

[valerique]

I think we should really all bite our tounges to see what he really produces. ... so if KVA just knocks Hedi's good stuff off (which I am sure is what LVMH is going to mandate) then it will be no worse than what Hedi was heading towards anyway.

finally someone said it!
I understand all the negative posts and doubts, I know what you mean, but why are we so mean? The guy hasn't even started yet and we're already slashing him! I'm rooting for him, I hope he does well with the first collection. I don't even want to think what it is to be him right now.
Fashion people are merciless, aren't they...

 

[Izreal]

I agree... the level of snobbism in here is quite disguting ..

I actually don't think it could get quite worst at DH... i've seen the entire AW07 look-book and it is quite hiedous in terms of design and fabrics ( ugly zippers on everything, cheap bland looking outerwear, horrid footwear ).

overall maybe 5 interesting pieces over 200+ !

i believe hedi really didn't have much input or drive left on the cruise collection... i think he basically just did the runway show and left the rest to the assistants.. (he even admits leaving dior just weeks after the show)

on the other hand i am not a grand fan of KvA's current line, but the man did have some input into the early DH collections that some of you dior whores worship, so i wouldnt be so quick to bury the guy before he's even started.

i will give him the benefit of the doubt.. if not well blah.. dh is already dead right?!

 

[jefei]

Those businessmen... money money money, greedy greedy greedy...
gosh....

 

[DosViolines]

nymag.com

Dior Man
With the traditional vernacular of men’s clothes—understatement, attention to detail—Kris Van Assche is trying to make the fashion world forget about Hedi what’s-his-name.

By Amy Larocca

(Photo: Gaëtan Bernard)

My idea of valeur and elegance is so hard to find,” says menswear designer Kris Van Assche, with a wistful sigh. A very beautiful boy has just dropped his pants to reveal a loud and hideous tattoo on his calf, and it is clear from Van Assche’s disappointed face that, despite his Grecian good looks, this boy just won’t do.

Van Assche is in final fittings for his next fashion show on a drizzly Wednesday morning. His small, clean office is bright, white, and filled with the revolving cast of handsome teenage boys (some 600, in fact, one every two minutes) who will show off his odd, sometimes-pleated suiting that, this season, has taken its cues from the quirky, nostalgic photographs of August Sander. Menswear shows in Milan have just ended, and Van Assche has been disappointed by the funny haircuts and new tattoos that have been arriving in Paris all week. Also: Too much muscle is not, for Van Assche, a good thing, and he struggles to button a jacket across an especially strapping chest. “La bonne tête, la bonne démarche,” he says sadly, “mais c’est pas la bonne veste.”

Van Assche is tall, handsome, Belgian. His pristine white shirt is quite carefully tucked half in, half out, his jeans are dark, and he is full of designer-y thoughts. “I don’t know if it’s inspired by clowns or old people, but I guess that’s the point. They are both kind of sad,” he says of Sander’s work. He likes the awkwardness of it, the formality of people from the working classes dressed up for formal portraits. “When you get old,” he says, “your neck gets skinny. And your wedding suit, it has been hanging for twenty years and it is stretched out.” He’s nostalgic for these moments, for a lot of moments, really, and has named his show “Souvenir.” It’s all very sweet and somewhat sentimental, and on each seat at his show, he will place a small lavender sachet. “He’s a romantic,” says Michael Macko, the mens fashion director at Saks. “It’s all, like, about some people in some country sewing clothes in, like, some little house.”

It’s not the typical mad fuss 24 hours before a women’s fashion show. Van Assche is organized and well prepared: Each outfit hangs on a rack beside a plastic bag of accessories (tiny clown hats, for example, that he will snap under the models’ chins and onto their foreheads, wingtips woven in silver braid). Each look has been photographed on its model several times: plainly, for the record, and then beautifully, by Van Assche himself.

It’s all very civilized in here. As one men’s editor comments, “Men’s fashion is very ladylike.”

But beneath the calm, fastidious organization, one detects a well-controlled panic in Van Assche, a slight raising of voice, darting of eyes; on Friday morning, he’ll show his own, privately backed, eponymous line in a sadly beautiful, grease-stained garage near the Bastille. On Sunday, though, he’ll be in a fancy Belle Époque mansion in the Sixteenth Arrondissement to make his debut as the designer of Dior Homme, a brand that’s been, for seven years, synonymous with the name of Hedi Slimane, Van Assche’s former boss, who left Dior just months earlier in a flurry of angry Web posts.

There has never been a menswear designer with the influence of Hedi Slimane. In his seven years at Dior (and his two years before that at YSL), Slimane created a world of super-skinny, teenage-sexy, breathless rock and roll that defined a moment, at least in fashion terms. He was anomalous as a menswear designer because he treated men’s fashion with the same urgency and lust as a women’s designer: It changed from season to season; it was an unattainable yet buyable fantasy. It was old David Bowie, it was Kate Moss and Pete Doherty, and it was endlessly, epically cool. It was not heroin chic, exactly, but not not heroin chic, either. The Slimane look was razor-sharp Parisian tailorings seen through a scrim of carefully executed rock-star grime. He found his models not only in agency-driven castings but on the street and at sweaty rock shows, and they had zits on their cheeks (sometimes) and tiny waists (always). Women wanted, and wore, Hedi. Even men who are neither gay nor Japanese (men’s capital-F fashion’s two biggest markets) wanted something by Hedi Slimane. Karl Lagerfeld lost almost 100 pounds in order to fit into a pair of Hedi Slimane pants.

But in April, a year of contract negotiations between Dior and Slimane ended. “I tried to make things work for about a year,” Slimane wrote on his Website. “Perhaps [at] another time in my life, under other circumstances, my name, and the management of a company under my own label, would be considered differently.”

What he meant, presumably, was that LVMH was not giving him enough autonomy. That the company was not going to back his own line in conjunction with a continuation of his contract at Dior (an arrangement similar to Marc Jacobs’s with Louis Vuitton).

And so Dior let him go and turned to Van Assche, who had worked for Slimane at both YSL and Dior. Van Assche had not, in fact, ever worked for anyone else, and had left Dior only to start his own label. “I wanted my own collection, my own baby,” he says. “I needed to develop my own identity.” Which he has, and it’s an identity as diametrically opposed to that of his former boss as possible. He describes it as “a grown-up man who doesn’t want to be too classic, but also is not a fashion kid,” by which he means clothes that are not stuffy but not for a rock show or a boy hustler, either.

“What is the point of coming to Paris and doing fashion,” Van Assche wonders one morning in the gilt lobby of the Plaza Athénée, “if it is not to make life more beautiful?” So what did he think of Slimane’s skinny, zitty kids? “That is not a vision of elegance,” he says carefully. “That is not what I put onstage, that is not what I relate to.”

Men’s fashion shows play a very different role in the industry from the one women’s shows do. “Men’s runway really appeals to a small percentage of consumers,” says Robert Burke, a fashion consultant. “The business being done during a men’s show is about branding. It’s attitude, it’s positioning, because these are lifestyle brands; it’s about men’s, women’s accessories, home, travel.” Men don’t respond to trends like women do: Runway pictures are scoff-worthy for a great number of men, whose style tends to change in a slow morph of details over years or even decades. When men’s fashion gets extreme—kilts! Speedos!—it tends to get giggles rather than gasps. “Look, it can be scary for me, and I get it!” Macko says.

Because men’s fashion, at its core, is conservative. Even men who are considered “well dressed” aren’t into fashion; scan any best-dressed list and you’ll find its members get their suits from tiny bespoke tailors in London and Florence. Splashy menswear launches of recent memory include Thom Browne, whose inspiration is a fifties accountant who likes stiff Scotch and racquetball, and Tom Ford, who surrounds very traditional suiting with egregious luxury and astonishing price tags. His suits aren’t radical, though their marketing is, and that, perhaps, is the key to his success. Because too much fashion on a man just isn’t, when it comes down to it, masculine enough for most men.

Van Assche’s debut for Dior was, he says, an homage to Dior’s famous atelier, a showcase for what such highly skilled hands can do. It was sort of camp Fitzgerald, with tableaux vivants of Van Assche’s beautiful, beautiful boys in endless combinations of white shirts and black trousers in every conceivable permutation: flat-fronted and narrow, full and pleated a bit, pleated a bit more, pleated all the way down the leg. “I want to bring back the feeling of a salon,” Van Assche says, “the feeling of Mr. Dior.”

But there isn’t a great tradition of “Mr. Dior,” as far as menswear is concerned. The great French houses have status because of their work in womenswear: in couture, in ready-to-wear. The men’s businesses appeared as appendages, without particular identities apart from an idea of luxury and craft, until Hedi Slimane came along.

And so this celebration of luxury and skill, perhaps, is what Van Assche means. Because it was all quite perfect, with rich, soft fabrics and precise, couture-level finishes.

The critical response was mixed: It was beautifully executed, but what was the message? But does men’s fashion really need a message? Van Assche seemed to be saying that he hadn’t quite decided on one, but that perhaps luxury and quality can be enough. Men want nice white shirts and well-tailored pants, and Dior’s atelier is more than ready to provide these things. “I don’t like fashion when it gets too theatrical,” Van Assche says. “I like my inspiration closer to reality.”

Slimane is working on his photography now, mostly, and rumors (which he declines to comment on) swirl that PPR (the group that owns Gucci) or Karl Lagerfeld is moments from backing him. But he is not currently making clothes, and he insists that he has no imminent plans to do so.

It’s not the first time a big success has found a big corporation too difficult to work with: Witness Tom Ford, Alexander McQueen, Jil Sander, Helmut Lang—all of whom struggled for creative autonomy under corporate umbrellas.

“You have to threaten to overshadow the brand, but not actually overshadow it,” says one retailer who asked not to be named, such are the relationships with these big companies. Dior needs to sell because it’s Dior, not Hedi Slimane for Dior, and that stands for something; despite his cult following (there are rumors of Hedi tattoos on some fashion forearms), Dior will work just fine as something quieter. “You do have the men’s fashion customer who knows about Hedi, who knows that there’s been a switch,” says Macko, “but that’s a very small percentage. I think ultimately, the name of the house is far bigger than any designer.”

And Van Assche can, happily, hold his neoclassical ground. “I’ve never related to things that aren’t beautiful,” he says. “I like good shape, nice skin. I spend a lot of time in libraries, and with my grandmother.

“Sometimes I am inspired by tango dancers or Arabic tribes. Sometimes it is crazy stuff, but the idea never outgrows the essence of fashion, which I believe is to make people more beautiful. An idea should never overshadow the essence of beauty. And an idea should never make things grotesque.”

THE NEOCLASSICIST VS. THE TRADITIONALIST Top row, from left: Hedi Slimane and several of his game-changing creations. Bottom row, from left: Kris Van Assche and clothes from his first collection for Dior Homme. [FONT=Georgia,Garamond,Times]

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[mass]

that's a good article, despite disagreeing with a lot of the things he says (i do like him, actually). thanks for posting it.

 

[valerique]

^Thank you for the article, DosViolines.
uhm... I can't tell whether I like the clothes or not. It looks very rigid to me. Let's see more vbmenu_register("postmenu_3421866", true);

 

[bearbrick]

anyone is better than slimane........if its true he is going to chanel......as karl's poodle......then i wonder what will happen when the claws are out....!!! that would make interesting CatWalk show stopper !!!

KvA......is new . give him a chance ......yes BUT from what one can sense ..... actually its not LVMH....DIOR is Arnault;s prive domain.....KvA will be "sensible " and there better be substance !!

but thank goodness for slimane's departure ...he was way too indulgent

FASHION KEN ...why did you say ...slimane HAD to go ?? do tell /express. tx

 

[LostInNJ]

After reading the article and understanding more about what Kris Van Assche wants to do, I am looking forward to his next collection. However, the way the article dismisses what Hedi brought to the table isn't right. Yes, he played on the same ideas each season, but that is what Dior came to be about. Now, people act as though it was never cool or chic. I think that there was more diversity in the world of men's fashion when Hedi was at Dior and Kris was only concentrating on his own line.