Yahoo Finance ‘Everyone back to the Ritz’; Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell give designer Kim Jones a send off to remember at his final Louis Vuitton show during Paris Men's Fashion Week
"We couldn’t hear the cue to go on because of all the screaming," said Kate Moss of Kim Jones’s final bow as head of Louis Vuitton menswear, flanked on the catwalk by Moss and the other most famous supermodel in the world, Naomi Campbell.
The screams in question were the cheers of the crowd, among them Victoria and David Beckham and their son Brooklyn, a highfalutin send-off for this softly spoken Londoner who has quietly reinvented the men’s arm of the house.
"It’s about clothes that can change, about fabrics that can travel on the body - and transform," said a tight-lipped Jones, who wouldn’t be drawn on where he was heading (the aggressive bouncers made sure of that). "Discovering something new. A constant voyage," he said, that journey about to set a new course for the man in question.
As a sentimental farewell, Jones took a trip down memory lane and the defining moments from his Vuitton career since 2011, re-animating some greatest hits from the archives.
His first collection for the house, which was founded as a luxury luggage outfitter in 18th century Paris, married that exoticism and sense of adventure with Jones’ own love of travel. Having grown up in Africa, his first collection featured intrepid explorers in cagoules, rucksacks and mountain boots, setting off into the great yonder.
Here they returned, this time in skate and dove-grey tones (a palette he adopted in January 2016 to reflect the shades of Paris’ rooftops in a love letter to the city after the terror attacks).
Jones’ calling card during his tenure at Vuitton has been to marry a street-style sensibility with this most rarified of Parisian houses, notably in his collaboration with Supreme last year. This dynamic sportswear energy infused the basketball tops, blousy shorts and jogging trousers, rendered in liquid silks and iridescent tech fabric; elevated beyond the basketball court like only Jones knows how.
Animal conservation and the natural world are passions of Jones’, whose father’s work as a hydrogeologist took him across the globe and who would exchange correspondence with David Attenborough as a child. A natural landscape - a fragmented rust and anthracite tundra - featured on a print across coats and woven into a knit.
Cherry blossoms were picked out on chocolate leather, an ode to his affection for Japan, while blasts of neon knits were a smiley face reminder of the rave era backdrop against which Jones began his menswear career in London. A traffic-cone-hued number an indicator that the future looks bright for the designer.
Throughout his career at the storied house, Jones has shown how to make the most luxurious materials - drop shoulder vicuña coats, liquid silk pyjama tops - seem unerringly, untouchably cool and modern, as well as creating clothes that men really want to wear, a line that most designers tiptoe along but never finesse.
Jones, probably the best working menswear designer today, might be in transit - like the Vuitton luggage that traverses the globe - but at least he can count on Kate Moss for consistency. Cigarette and champagne in hand, she was making plans backstage to give him the mother of all send-offs at the Ritz. He’s earned it.
