For spring/summer 2021, Dior Men’s Kim Jones has created a collection aimed as a “celebration of identity, of power of creativity” as he pays homage to Ghanaian-born artist Amoako Boafo.
The collaboration came about after a meeting at the Rubell Museum in Miami, where Jones describes it as “artistic love at first sight” in the show notes, which has led to an “intimate, all-encompassing and honest cultural conversation” since 2019, and is at the heart of the Dior Men’s spring/summer 2021 collection.
Entitled ‘Portrait of an Artist’, the collection features a cornucopia of stripes, florals and neons, with the colours drawn from the vivid, near-surreal hues of Amoako Boafo’s artworks, while the graphic patterns, jacquard of paintbrush strokes, are based on a photograph taken by Jones of a textured canvas at the artist’s studio.
The creative starting point for the collection was Boafo’s painting ‘Green Beret’, showing a man wearing a shirt covered in an ivy leaf print, with dark green pants and a matching beret. This print, Jones said reminded him of an ivy-covered dress designed by Christian Dior in 1950. This was interpreted into a retro-style knitted shirt, layered with a pale yellow ribbed-knit turtleneck, shorts styled with a tuxedo belt, lace-up boots, and of course, a beret.
Amoako Boafo ’s artwork inspires throughout, right down to the layering of the garments, through colour, cuts, proportions, and styling, which Jones explains have been “artfully manipulate by the Black gaze of Amoako’s paintings” through three-dimensionality, with fabrications that have been printed and layered, ribbed knits incorporating jacquard patterns, and embroideries on knitwear to showcase the appearance of a printed canvas.