Kim Jones

Kim Jones made menswear for Louis Vuitton and Dior, then spent four years designing women’s collections at Fendi alongside his Dior role. Since October 2025 he has directed Areal, a premium outerwear line for Bosideng. His work moves comfortably between a luxury house’s archive and the codes of sportswear, from technical jackets to the Louis Vuitton x Supreme collection. (Bloomberg; Business of Fashion)

Jones has always collected as avidly as he designs. Books, records and historical clothes fill the archive he draws on for collections, giving his collaborations more to work with than a pair of logos. A football shirt or a sneaker can sit beside couture embroidery because he is interested in the history and use of each. (W Magazine)

London, Ecuador and East Africa

Jones was born in London on 11 September 1973. His father worked as a hydrogeologist, and the family followed his postings abroad from the time Jones was three months old: Ecuador first, then stretches in the Caribbean and across East Africa, including Ethiopia, Kenya and Botswana. He has said the diversity of what he saw as a child — colour, cloth, craft, landscape — stayed with him as a working reference for the rest of his career, and it resurfaced explicitly decades later in a Dior collection built around his father's connection to the continent. (HIGHXTAR)

Back in London as a teenager, he studied graphics and photography at Camberwell School of Art before enrolling on the MA Fashion course at Central Saint Martins, specialising in menswear under the course's influential head, the late Louise Wilson. He graduated in 2002, and his degree show attracted enough attention that he launched his own label the following year, showing his first collection at London Fashion Week in September 2003. He ran the label for five years alongside a growing list of outside design jobs, closing it in 2008 to take the creative directorship at Dunhill. (Interview Magazine; Hypebeast)

Dunhill and Umbro: a sportswear vocabulary inside tailoring

The two jobs that shaped Jones's method both ran through his own label years. From 2005 he designed Umbro by Kim Jones, taking the football brand's kit language — technical fabrics, panelling, the diamond motif — and reworking it as menswear; it ran to a ninth season by spring 2008. In February 2008 Alfred Dunhill made him its first creative director, modernising a very traditional British leather-and-tailoring house with a younger, travel-inflected wardrobe. He stepped down in September 2010, seeing through a final collection before moving on. The combination — rigorous English tailoring credentials plus a working fluency in sportswear construction — is what luxury houses would spend the next decade hiring him for. (Cool Hunting; Drapers)

Louis Vuitton: monogram meets street, and Supreme

Louis Vuitton appointed Jones style director of men's ready-to-wear on 2 March 2011, working initially under Marc Jacobs, who held the house's overall artistic direction; when Jacobs left in 2013, Jones became solely responsible for menswear. Over seven years he pushed the house toward technical sportswear, travel gear and cross-cultural references — expeditions, cartography, Basquiat, cycling kit — building a menswear business that behaved, commercially, more like a streetwear label than a heritage trunk-maker. (Business of Fashion)

The 2017 Louis Vuitton x Supreme collection put the New York skate label’s red box logo beside Vuitton’s monogram on bags, denim and outerwear. Its tightly controlled release made the pieces instant resale objects. It also showed how far Jones had moved luxury menswear towards the pace and appetite of streetwear. (South China Morning Post; Drapers)

Dior: the archive as a working method

Christian Dior Couture named Jones creative director of Dior Homme's menswear on 19 March 2018; he started on 1 April and showed his debut collection, for Summer 2019, in June. That first show renamed the division from Dior Homme to simply Dior, on the premise that men's and women's collections, and beauty, should sit under one house name rather than a gendered sub-label — a change that still shapes how pieces from either side of it are labelled. (Hypebeast; The Industry.fashion)

The Summer 2019 debut also set the pattern for how Jones would use the runway itself: the artist KAWS built a 32-foot pink BFF sculpture as the show's centrepiece, and the two released a capsule collection alongside it. He repeated the model with a Fall/Winter 2019 collection worked with hand-beaded artwork by Raymond Pettibon, and a Spring 2020 show staged inside crumbling, ash-covered furniture and typography built by artist Daniel Arsham, whose "Future Relics" aesthetic went on to produce its own capsule and an advertising campaign for the house. (Hypebeast; WWD)

The most consequential of these was sneaker-shaped. Unveiled at a pre-fall 2020 show in Miami and finally released in 2020 after a pandemic delay, the Dior x Air Jordan 1 was the first partnership between a couture house and Nike's Jordan Brand: an Air Jordan 1 High remade in fine Italian calf leather, Dior Oblique jacquard standing in for the Swoosh, and an embossed "AIR DIOR" wordmark, limited to 8,500 pairs sold through Dior stores by lottery. It did for sneaker culture roughly what Louis Vuitton x Supreme had done for streetwear three years earlier — proof that a couture house's imprimatur could sit directly on a category it had never touched, without diluting either side's standing. Jones's own signature sneaker for the house, the B23, mixed a high-top basketball silhouette with the same Oblique canvas and became one of Dior Men's most consistently produced products across his tenure. (Robb Report; Hypebae)

Jones left Dior on 31 January 2025, ending seven years in the role; his final collection had been shown at Paris Men's Fashion Week the week before. (Bloomberg)

Fendi: couture built the same way

Fendi named Jones creative director of women's haute couture, ready-to-wear and fur on 9 September 2020, adding the role to his Dior post and filling the position Karl Lagerfeld had held until his death in 2019. His first collection was Fall/Winter 2021. He worked alongside Silvia Venturini Fendi, who continued to lead accessories and menswear, and applied the same research-driven method he used at Dior — one collection built around his father's time in East Africa, another referencing Virginia Woolf's Orlando through the house's Rome address at the Villa Medici. He stepped down on 11 October 2024, staying on at Dior for a further three months. (Wonderland; Fashionista)

Areal, and after LVMH

In October 2025 Jones joined Bosideng to direct Areal, its new premium outerwear line. The role takes him back to technical clothing, a thread running through his earlier menswear, and gives him a different manufacturing base from the European luxury houses where he spent most of his career. (Hypebeast; Business of Fashion)

Reading and dating the work

Few designers' output carries as many overlapping labels as Jones's, because so much of his career was built on collaboration rather than a single house identity. A few distinctions matter for placing a specific piece:

• Umbro by Kim Jones (2005–2008) is a joint line, not mainline Umbro, and predates all of his creative-director posts — do not confuse it with later Umbro collaborations with other designers.
• Dunhill pieces from 2008–2010 are his; the house had no creative director before him, so a "Dunhill by [an earlier name]" mark is not from his tenure.
• Louis Vuitton menswear from 2011 through his final show in January 2018 is his work, though under Marc Jacobs's overall artistic direction until 2013. The 2017 Supreme pieces carry both marques and are the most counterfeited items from this period; authentication should rely on Louis Vuitton's and Supreme's own published hardware and stitching guides rather than the box logo alone.
• Dior menswear from his Summer 2019 debut is labelled simply "Dior," not "Dior Homme" — he dropped "Homme" from the division's name at his first show. A piece tagged "Dior Homme" predates June 2018 and belongs to his predecessor, Kris Van Assche.
• Fendi womenswear and couture from Fall/Winter 2021 through his final Fall/Winter 2024 collection is his; accessories and menswear across the same years stayed with Silvia Venturini Fendi regardless of season.
• Dior x Air Jordan 1 pairs carry an "AIR DIOR" wordmark and a numbered edition out of 8,500; unnumbered pairs are not from the authorised release.
• Retail delivery lags a runway season by months, so the useful distinction is always the season a piece was designed for, not the date it reached a shop floor.

References

• Bloomberg. "Dior Menswear Designer Kim Jones Leaves Struggling LVMH Label." 31 January 2025.
• Business of Fashion. "Kim Jones Appointed Creative Director of Bosideng's New Premium Sub-Label." October 2025.
• Hypebeast. "Kim Jones To Lead Bosideng's New Sub-Brand, Areal." October 2025.
• W Magazine (Jenny Comita). "Kim Jones Settles Into the Fendi Family." 15 December 2021.
• HIGHXTAR. "This Is the Touching Reason Why Kim Jones and Africa."
• Interview Magazine. "Kim Jones." 9 May 2016.
• Hypebeast. "Beyond Supreme x Louis Vuitton: How Kim Jones Became the Messiah of Menswear." April 2017.
• Cool Hunting. "Umbro and Kim Jones for Fantastic Man."
• Drapers. "Kim Jones Steps Down as Alfred Dunhill Creative Chief." September 2010.
• Business of Fashion. "Kim Jones' Vuitton Journey."
• South China Morning Post. "What Louis Vuitton Men's Artistic Director Kim Jones Really Thinks About the Supreme Collaboration."
• Drapers. "Kim Jones to Exit Louis Vuitton." January 2018.
• The Industry.fashion. "Kim Jones Appointed Artistic Director at Dior Homme." March 2018.
• Hypebeast. "From Dior Homme to Dior Men, How Kim Jones Made Couture for Men." February 2025.
• Hypebeast. "Dior's Fall/Winter 2019 Collection by Kim Jones." January 2019.
• WWD. "Exclusive: Kim Jones Taps Daniel Arsham to Design Dior Show Set." June 2019.
• Robb Report. "Air Jordan's New Sneaker Collaboration With Dior Is Setting the Internet on Fire."
• Hypebae. "Dior Officially Launches the Air Jordan 1 High and Low OG Silhouettes." June 2020.
• Wonderland. "Fendi Announces Kim Jones As New Artistic Director." 9 September 2020.
• Fashionista. "Kim Jones Parts Ways With Fendi." October 2024.