Chaos and order in Dior's Pre-Fall 2021 collection

For some years now Kim Jones has introduced, with great success, her peculiar collaborative method in Dior's collections. In addition to being a master in mixing "high" and "low" aesthetic suggestions, Jones is also a designer who knows the art world up close and takes his curatorial approach everywhere he goes. The artist with whom he collaborated for Dior's Pre-Fall 2021, digitally presented yesterday, Kenny Scharf, may seem almost antithetical to the Jones-ian aesthetic developed in recent years – and this is the real strength of the collection. Instead of musseling together, Scharf's ultra-pop and surrealist chaos has seamlessly mixed with Jones' sartorial rigour with the result of creating one of the most beautiful Dior collections of the British designer's career. 

Before discussing the collection, we need to take a step back and talk about Kenny Scharf. Born in Los Angeles and transplanted to the East Coast, Scharf made a name for himself in the art world on the New York scene of the East Village in the 1980s — a chaotic, hedonistic era marked by deep inequalities. A friend of Basquiat and Haring, Scharf created a surrealist, hyper-colourful style that reflected his love of modern design and pop culture, especially for Hanna-Barbera cartoons such as The Flinstones and The Jetsons. Under the psychedelic and cartoonish aesthetics of his creations, however, Scharf hid a bitter and surrealist irony about the state of the modern world, his oleographic galaxies reflected the fractures and contradictions of reality that surrounded him – an art born in the chaos that resonates perfectly with the situation in which the world of 2020 found itself living. 

Starting from Scharf's artwork, Jones traces a collection that, before being a collection of clothes, is a collection of personal suggestions and influences: from the cosmological scenario suggested to him, at least in part, from his passion for the series The Mandalorian to the embroidery created by Chinese artisans, passing through the eternal love of uniforms and the opulent aestheticism of Edwardian taste. All these seemingly disparate elements have been harmonized by Jones's personal vision – which cements the collection which, seen in its unity, turns out to be among the most balanced and guessed ever produced by the English designer. The collection, moreover, having originally been scheduled for a show in Beijing, represents a very balanced synthesis between Western aesthetics and Chinese taste – an element that in the coming years will be increasingly indispensable for any designer whose success the Chinese market will be the most crucial judge.