Unpacking the Best Fashion Show of the Year (So Far)

This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.

At a quarter past 7:00 on Friday evening in Paris, Robert Pattinson parted a crowd of dark navy and gray suits in a serenely-lit restaurant off the Champs-Élysées and escorted Kim Jones to an elevated stage. Jones, the creative director of Dior Men’s, was the man of the hour—for a couple of reasons. For one, he was about to receive the chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, the highest civilian award in France, at a cocktail reception held at historic upper-crust watering hole Laurent. Which is a big deal, as far as these things go. The list of designers who have won the honor reads like a fashion hall of fame: Karl Lagerfeld, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, and John Galliano, among others. Anna Wintour pinned the medal on Jones’s lapel while he dabbed at his eyes and Pattinson (a Dior ambassador and friend) beamed.

Kim Jones on his way to his Légion d’Honneur ceremony.

Jacopo Raule/Getty Images

It was the designer’s second emotional crescendo of the day; hours before, Jones orchestrated what might go down as the best runway show of his French-knighthood-worthy career, a stupendously luxurious tour de force for Dior Men that made every other suit cost and boot shown this season look clumsy and cheap, and which was met with a thundering standing ovation.

But was Jones’s big day a swan song? The talk of Paris Fashion Week has revolved around whether Jones will depart the role he’s held since 2018 as part of an all-but-confirmed creative shakeup at LVMH’s marquee maison. Naturally, detective hats were out at the show, held in an imposing Dior-gray tent on the grounds of the École Militaire. Guests who Shazamed the defiant orchestral soundtrack discovered that it was pulled from an Alexander McQueen documentary. And what to make of Jones’s misty-eyed bow, where he hugged Christian Dior CEO Delphine Arnault?

Dior menFall Winter 2025 2026,MenYANNIS VLAMOS

In a preview on Thursday, the designer seemed unbothered by all the chatter as he contemplated his impending knighthood. “It’s kind of surreal,” he said. “I’m going to cry, probably. I’m proud of it. It’s kind of mental to get these things.” (The designer also has an OBE from his native Great Britain. “I need to get the Danish one now,” he joked.)

And he was matter-of-fact as ever as he walked through the collection, a radical break from his recent explorations of casual, streetwear-curious splendor. “I’ve just done really pure Dior,” he remarked, a center of relative calm in the bustling studio.

But this was not business as usual. Besides a few inside-out clothing tags on fine jersey undershirts, there were no logos in sight, and no splashy collaboration with a fine artist as Jones has done time and again. Instead, for Fall 2025 Jones went for pure aristocratic minimalism, with exquisitely structured tailoring inspired by Christian Dior’s “H-Line” haute couture collection from 1954 and silk faille swing coats in the season’s tightly edited color palette of light pink, dark navy, and jet black. The sense of exquisite formality extended through more quotidian pieces, like floaty velvet joggers and a rounded blouson so sculpted and seamless it looked like the very essence of a leather jacket.

At Dior, Jones has more than mastered the art of the eye-catching status symbol, but these clothes had a more scintillating allure, with collarbones peeking out of gossamer silk blouses and baby cashmere knits, which hugged the shoulder line like formal ballgowns. Some models wore ribbons of silk around their eyes, giving the black tie affair a sense of kinky mystery. (Jones borrowed the idea from a picture of Christian Dior at a masked ball. “This woman next to him had this really chic thing like this on,” he said.”)