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Between the frenzied Anne Clark techno soundtrack and the pentagrams continuously featured on blazers and tops, they were pretty much ringing in doomsday at Dior Homme. Or so you’d think, at least, until the show progressed and a rather more positive vibe started showing its face. Kris Van Assche has a fetish for the future and for changing the conventional codes of men’s attire. At Dior Homme, his bid for a new way of dressing revisited the svelte silhouette that once defined the label, but it was far from clichéd. He looked to 97’s Gattaca (instant points for using a late-90s reference) to create a sort of Star Trek-y aesthetic, which went hand-in-hand immaculately with the neat freak vibes that have always had a home at Van Assche’s Dior Homme. Opening the show in the polished bright white venue, Ben Allen – who no doubt caught the designer’s attention when he featured in i-D online’s KRISVANASSCHE x thecorner.com feature last month – wore a little black suit, whose buttons of yesteryear had been replaced by one very modern zip. The silhouette soon morphed into a [manly] hourglass variety, nipped in at the waist with what likely referenced the seatbelts of a spaceship. As the show progressed and one uniformed boy followed the other, a certain march-like atmosphere – which often occurs at Van Assche’s Dior Homme shows – began to materialise, emphasising the youth movement element of the designer’s message. The Dior Homme AW13 collection was the cult of the future, and the future’s looking bright.
Text: Anders Christian Madsen
Photography: Mitchell Sams
