Keeping up with the Jones

52

Keeping up with the Jones Crowned Menswear Designer of the Year three times, he’s worked for a range of labels from Alexander McQueen to Alfred Dunhill and, now, Louis Vuitton. But Kim Jones is motivated more by the respect of his peers than the pretensions of his industry WORDS JOSH SIMS PORTRAIT RALPH MECKE

55

It’s not the glossy, Parisian-chic scenario one might expect from Louis Vuitton, arguably the most luxe of luxury brands. Arriving at the photo studio to have his portrait taken, Kim Jones, its newish head of menswear, is wearing jeans, faded sweatshirt and a heavy metal necklace of sufficient thickness to keep a rabid Rottweiler at bay. And he is eating chicken McNuggets. ‘We had a big party last night,’ he says by way of explanation.

He is still suffering its afterglow.

The naturalness of the scene is, however, entirely apt. The pretension that Jones could have accrued like a patina by the end of this, his first decade in the fashion industry, might well be expected, especially given his run of successes: his eponymous label; work for the diverse bunch that is Mulberry, Umbro, Uniqlo and Alexander McQueen; the creative directorship of Alfred Dunhill, where he also seemed at odds with all that stiff British formality; and now the hard-to-top position at Louis Vuitton. And that is not to forget the three British Fashion Council Menswear Designer of the Year gongs he has collected along the way, for his own label, for Dunhill and, last November, for Vuitton. Apparently, the trophies have become more lightweight and plasticky over the years.

It is Jones’ overseer, Marc Jacobs, artistic director at Louis Vuitton since 1997, who is getting all the glory, however: on now at Paris’s Les Arts Décoratifs is a hefty exhibition detailing the respective contributions to the fashion world of the brand and the man, comparing 19th-century industrialisation – when Vuitton’s artisanship both flourished and was challenged – with the period of globalisation through which Jacobs has worked.

One can’t imagine Jones being bothered by this at all – he notes how much he respects his boss, but then we all say that in public. In fact, he is a pretension-free package. When he says that, if he didn’t work in fashion, he would have to do something else entirely – ‘conservation, maybe, working with animals’, the sentiment seems sincere and a long way from anything Jacobs might be imagined proposing. He’s certainly enthusiastic – bowled over by his new employer’s heritage and heft, what he calls ‘the wow of it’. And he’s sympathetic, conscious of the role luxury goods should have in an austerity society: ‘Our job is to provide people who work really hard with things they can invest in, then enjoy and appreciate.

And if that’s a leather jacket that costs £5,000, it needs to last a lifetime.’ But, above all, he is business-minded.

‘Nowadays, fashion is all about big brands and that means, as a designer, you have to be adaptable.

I have a broad perspective on menswear because I’ve done so many different things,’ he says. ‘I design for a huge demographic that could be buying the same product – from super-rich kids of 16 to traditional 80-year-olds.

Of course, you can style it up to give that sense of power that some brands have – and Louis Vuitton is a power brand in that respect. But it’s just as much about detail and craft. It’s quite boysy and can get a bit nerdy, but the idea of something working properly is important.

These are very real clothes.’

Indeed, Jones’ first on-the-shelves collection for the house, for this spring/summer, meets just that brief – one, incidentally, that he always writes for himself, having been given carte blanche by his bosses. There are the usual luxury excesses, of course: silk ties shot through with 24ct gold, café-racer jackets in alligator skin, the iconic Vuitton monogram on scarves and bags. But there is also elegant, louche suiting, comfortable pyjama pants, desert boots and safari-style clothes, as well as technical pieces given a luxury spin and preppy classics given a technical one. Silks, for example, are triple-bonded to be breathable, while pockets are edged with performance tape. Jones can’t resist picking up an all-singing, all-dancing black jacket he has selected for himself and demonstrating the cuffs’ new fastening mechanism.

‘I’m lucky that I can choose some great pieces each season,’ he notes with evident pleasure.

The collection has both the kind of grown-up wearability and the commercial punch the times dictate – even for those with money still to spare, even for brands as big as Louis Vuitton’s parent LVMH. And it suggests too that Jones is likely to be welcome to hold on to what he calls his ‘dream job’ for as long as he likes. After all, LVMH grand fromage Bernard Arnault must have some reason for his recent suggestion that he was ‘fairly confident’ of growth for the company this year, while western economies go into meltdown.

Might he see Jones and his sketchpad as a cornerstone of that prediction? Louis Vuitton menswear is, remember, a baby within the brand portfolio. Its first dedicated men’s ready-to-wear line was established only in 2000, the next couple of years adding the inevitably logo-heavy pieces and the first outerwear, each season adding a missing part of the jigsaw. Marc Jacobs, then as now, oversaw the artistic direction of the brand, but, by 2006, Jones’ predecessor, Paul Helbers, one-time senior designer for Martin Margiela, had been taken on as head of the men’s ready-to-wear studio. It was a statement of Louis Vuitton’s intention to ramp up the seriousness with which it took a market that was in frenzied growth mode. And now Jones’ timely sensibility for luxe utility can build on that.

‘I like the kind of clothes that won’t crease too much if you pack them in a suitcase and take them on a plane,’ Jones explains, undercutting fashion’s love of gimmickry with an unexpectedly everyday consideration. ‘I enjoy thinking about how products can make a stressful life less stressful. How can a customer get the most out of a jacket? Because a jacket at this price has to pay its way. And the technical capability, the fabric development of a company such as Louis Vuitton is where the progress will come from. I may be a fashion designer, but, here, you can’t help but think more like a product designer.’

While the whole idea of luxury has been tarnished by over-use and discoloured by association with excesses that now, more than ever, feel like poor taste – and a leather-jacketed and gold-trimmed teddy bear designed

‘Our job is to provide people who work really hard with things they can invest in and enjoy’

Opposite: The Louis Vuitton Pudsey bear for Children in Need, in Stephen Sprouse print, calfskin and shearling, with gold nose, studs and zips

This page: Louis Vuitton, spring/ summer 2012

Illustration Helen Delany

by Jones that sold for £35,600 last year might fit into this category had it not been for Children in Need – technology was as much Louis Vuitton the man’s original remit as was officially catering to the needs of Empress Eugénie de Montijo, the wife of Napoleon III. Vuitton’s design for a flat-topped trunk, which he launched in 1858, allowed them to be stacked, and the use of unusual materials such as Trianon canvas made them strong but also lightweight and airtight. The branding came only 18 years later, as a step to combat the widespread ripping-off of his design.

The idea of travel has remained central to the Louis Vuitton name and remains its guiding ethos. It plays strongly in Jones’ collection for the coming autumn/winter too, inspired as it is by Japonisme, the 19th-century blending of Japanese and French cultures that came about as a result of new trade agreements and was fuelled by the fascination for all things Oriental. Indeed, Louis Vuitton’s famed monogram was originally influenced by stylised Japanese graphics. The result is a west meets east fusion of camel coats and kimono shirts, baseball jackets and floaty, Bruce Lee-style trousers and touches of that characteristically Japanese talent for subverting the classic while respecting it: a derby shoe by Jones is crossed with a steel-toe-capped boot and rendered in astrakhan, for example.

He certainly gets on planes a lot, too, though one can hardly imagine him being too bothered about creasing his sweatshirt (though dropping the barbecue dipping sauce down it could be a cause for consternation).

He visits Africa every year – he spent a chunk of his childhood there, as well as in Japan and Ecuador, his father’s work in hydrology meaning the family moved around a lot – and makes an effort to travel to as many new places he can, especially now he has a generous five-week summer vacation à la française.

‘It’s like being back at school,’ he jokes. ‘And, like the shockingly rude taxi drivers here, just so French – it’s complete switch-off. You don’t even get an email.’

That said, for Jones, one eye is always on work. ‘I went to Mongolia last year,’ he says. ‘And there’s even a Louis Vuitton store there. That’s pretty crazy. Travel makes you realise how many different types of customer there are and how differently they all shop.’

Jones himself is not much of a shopper – like many designers, he claims that ‘when you’re looking at clothes all day, you get to the point where you really don’t want to think about what you’re wearing yourself’. When he does buy, he takes the rather unimaginative, male approach of buying in multiples. Presumably he has lots of sweatshirts, as well as what he calls his ‘usual uniform of shirts with jeans or chinos’. In other words, he’s not very fashion-y, and one wonders whether it is precisely this outsider’s perspective that has allowed him to find such a fitting vision for each of his employers. He agrees.

‘I don’t go to the fashion parties. I have a cosy apartment here and do a lot of cooking, and, tonight, I’m staying in and watching a DVD. I’ve never wanted my name on anything, so a position like this one suits me down to the ground. I’d rather just have respect from people in the industry.’

Josh Sims writes for Esquire, Wallpaper* and The Rake