No, you didn’t read that wrong. And yes, I am referring to that very Jack Kerouac.
Kim Jones connected her very personal obsession with Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation with the maison Dior to present the Fall 2022 collection of Dior Men.
Staged at the Olympia Exhibition Centre in London – where the very young curator Sammy Jay set up an exhibition with 63 volumes of the first editions of Kerouac’s works taken directly from the Jones home – the hometown of Dior’s creative director, the show and the collection recounted the temporal parallelism between the father of the beat movement and the designer who founded the maison and the French fashion house itself.
Immediately after the Second World War and up to the end of the 50s, the desire for rebirth, emancipation, freedom and carefreeness dominated the minds of young people on both sides of the Atlantic. This spark started a radical change in the approach and philosophy of life of many young people around the world pushing them not to homologate and subvert any status-quo. The Beat Generation is exactly that: a youthful rebellion that rejects imposed norms, materialism and wants to innovate style. It wants to take ownership of the revolution through sex, music, literature, drug use and much more by inventing a new language.
Starting from Columbia University in New York thanks to young writers like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William S. Burroughs, it was the starter of a redefinition of all kinds of priorities and a re-discovery of the world and the rules that man had given himself.
The temporal link thanks to which Jones was able to bring Kerouac and the maison Dior together is the year of publication of the American writer’s most famous novel, On The Road, written in 1951 but published in 1957. 1957 is also the year that Christian Dior passed away at the Grand Hotel & La Pace in Montecatini Terme after a game of canasta with a group of friends due to a collapse, at the age of 52. His place as artistic director of the maison went to the 21 year old Yves Saint Laurent who shocked and scandalized the fashion world with his first beatnik collections, which brought on the catwalk and in the world of haute-couture that youthful and rebellious counterculture. In one of these collections, Saint Laurent presented a biker jacket made of crocodile skin, calling it “Chicago”, which happened to be Kerouac’s destination in his trip On The Road.
Most likely it was this desire for contemporaneity that contributed to the dismissal of Yves Saint Laurent by Dior only 3 years later.
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The runway at Dior Men’s Fall 2022 show was a giant copy of On The Road, where models walked down the runway showing off tweed jackets and coats, 50s pants, trench coat/backpack hybrids, aviator shearlings, melange sweaters and knit pants tucked into boots.
This collection represents a quest, the desire for a necessary transformation of contemporary haute couture that Jones has been pursuing since taking over as creative director of Dior Men. An indomitable drive, like the one that characterized the beat movement, stemming from the incessant desire for creativity. The mixture of different styles that emerge from the looks are a figure of the fusion of several narrative styles that was the aesthetic emblem of the Beat Generation.
