Later today Dior will stage its Spring/Summer 2023 collection in Los Angeles. To be unveiled at a star-studded catwalk show on the City Of Stars' famous Venice Beach, the collection will be the latest from the Parisian brand's creative director Kim Jones, who has been running the menswear side of things since 2018. While little has been shown from the upcoming line, we do know that it will be heavily influenced by Christian Dior's own trips to Los Angeles, notably one that entailed in April 1957.
But for the spring line, Jones, who is no stranger to a collaboration (Kenny Scharf, Kaws and Ambush have all teamed up with Dior during the designer's time there) isn't going it alone. He has announced that he enlisted the help of buzzy new designer and LVMH Prize Finalist Eli Russell Linnetz to design the collection.
Linnetz is the founder of label ERL, which famously outfitted A$AP Rocky in an upcycled patchwork blanket for the 2021 Met Gala and Kid Cudi in a wedding dress for the 2021 CFDA awards. Based out in Los Angeles, Linnetz's involvement in the collection makes sense and it has been suggested by WWD's Paris bureau chief that together Jones and Linnetz have curated a small capsule collection, that will encapsulate “Californian Couture.”
Speaking to WWD, Jones said, “I’m doing two projects like this, this year, and that’s it, and I thought it was nice to work with younger designers I admire and give them the platform through Dior in a different way. Talking to all the people that I know that have gone through the pandemic and being independent, it’s been difficult, so I thought it was a nice way to support people and also, glean a bit of how they’re working… It gives us the capacity to do something in a different way than we’d work on it as Dior.”
Also in an interview with WWD, Linnetz explained, “Kim gave me the freedom to go in the archive and really explore things that maybe he hadn’t touched on before, and then I brought it back to him and he could really curate those designs. We were looking at the archive in the year when I was born, so we were interested and started at Gianfranco Ferré in the 1990s."
With Linnetz's own brand influenced by the Nineties skate scene (its campaigns feature models in ripped jeans doing kick flips) and comprising puffer jackets with punchy flower graphics and gradient-dyed knits, you can expect that the Dior and ERL capsule will be more of the same, especially as it's being staged a stones throw away from the global epicentre of skating, Venice Beach Skatepark. It has also been confirmed that Dior's iconic pieces, such as its tailored Bar jacket, will be reinterpreted with a sporty touch, while elsewhere products will be introduced in pastel shades and brighter tones akin to those used by ERL, that reflect the LA sunset.
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