Dior stages men’s show in Egypt as sales grow fivefold

On Saturday, as the sun set over the Great Pyramid of Giza, Dior staged a fashion show as the culmination of an unofficial celebration of its 75th year in business. A light show illuminated the trio of pyramids that flank the Sphinx, as a phalanx of 75 models, one for each year of the house’s life, trekked through the sand in British designer Kim Jones’s latest menswear collection, for autumn 2023.

As an expression of the might of Dior — both in the diplomacy of snagging that locale and the logistics of getting 300 or so press, clients and celebrities out there to witness it — it was hard to top (though Stefano Ricci did slightly beat Dior to the punch, staging a men’s show at Luxor’s Hatshepsut Temple in October). Business aside, the vision of the pyramids at dusk, etched with white light, will be scorched into the memory of all who saw it.

That is, of course, the point of events like this. “This show will be watched by more than 100mn people across the globe. That’s the real objective,” said Pietro Beccari, Dior’s chief executive. “Let’s make our clients dream.” The other objective is to sell that dream — which Jones is doing. Beccari said that the men’s business has increased more than fivefold since Jones became artistic director of menswear in 2018. That outpaces Dior’s strong overall sales growth, estimated by investment bank Stifel to have doubled from €2.9bn in 2018 to €6.2bn in 2021.

This was Dior’s first major show to be staged in the Middle East, a market that is booming because of the recent hike in oil prices. Yet for Jones, this was a profoundly personal show — he was raised across Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Botswana, and has wanted to stage a show on the African continent for some time. (He has a drawing on his bedroom wall, executed by the artist Derek Jarman, of the Great Pyramid.) There are also links to Dior, namely a dress titled “Cairo” that was designed in the house’s first year of business, and the fact that the city housed four Dior boutiques by 1948.

“It’s surreal,” Jones said of the opportunity to debut this collection in the Egyptian capital. A few days before his catwalk show, he had been previewing test images of those illuminated pyramids alongside rails of clothes and racks of bags. He was in a slightly grotty hotel in Giza, about three miles south-west of Cairo, chosen for its proximity to the pyramids rather than its creature comforts. His Dior collection was laid out in a ballroom frescoed with gold and hung with chandeliers glimmering with that blue-white light of LED bulbs and cheap crystal.

It was an incongruous setting for hyper-sophisticated clothes, some of the most luxurious in modern menswear: fine cashmere knits and lustrous wools draped into capes or tailored into knife-sharp jackets. There were also sci-fi helmets and jacked-up moon boots and harnesses inspired by Jones’s rereading of Frank Herbert’s epic Dune and an urge, he said, to see Egypt as symbolic of the future rather than the past. For that reason — and in homage to the superstitions of Christian Dior the man — the finale was composed of starry night prints taken from deep space images from Nasa.

Yet history is never far away at Dior. Embroideries derived from expansive Dior ballgowns of the 1940s were translated into dandyish sleeveless sweaters, while cocooning couture silhouettes shaped sweaters and tailoring. Even that sci-fi body-armour stuff was crosshatched with Dior’s cannage pattern — taken from the cane backs of the Louis Seize chairs that populated Christian Dior’s salon in the immediate postwar years — that was most famously transposed to the Princess Diana-toted Lady Dior bag of the 1990s.

But one of Jones’s major successes has been to tie the hitherto disconnected identity of Dior’s menswear closely to its womenswear heritage, using signs and signifiers of the house’s history.

Before the show, Beccari was applauding Jones’s fusion of old and new — but he wasn’t talking archives. He meant how Jones has shifted perceptions of Dior from somewhat staid purveyor of some of the best-made suits in luxury men’s ready-to-wear to a fully rounded masculine luxury house. Hence that fivefold increase. Jones can also, of course, still cut a mean two-piece.

“We didn’t lose any clients, we increased our reach,” Beccari said of the transition from Dior’s previous menswear designer, Kris Van Assche, to Jones. “And British tailoring is part of Kim’s DNA.” To prove the point, this show was peppered with classic grey tailoring, albeit often with half-kilts on top in a nod to the shendyt — the skirt-like garment you see on pharaohs and deities. There weren’t many other references to Egypt in this Dior collection — a bit of gold Lurex, some pyramid graphics — but engineering a collection for its locale can seem campy and schlocky. Rather, Jones’s Dior had global appeal.

Both Beccari and Jones seem thrilled with the results thus far — but there is still room for expansion. “We are not completely there with leather goods,” said Beccari. “We are going to be doing an offensive in the next couple of years.” Count the number of bags on Jones’s marching army of Dior men coming over the Egyptian dunes. That offensive, it seems, has already begun.

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