1 week Ago By Tina Isaac-Goizé
Tonight, hours after the lights went down on his fall 2025 Dior Men show, friends and admirers of Kim Jones, including Gwendoline Christie, Robert Pattinson, Kieran Culkin, Jeremy O. Harris, David Furnish, Chitose Abe, Rick Owens, and the CEO of Christian Dior, Delphine Arnault, gathered to see the designer knighted a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian honor. Established by Napoléon Bonaparte in 1802, the order of merit recognizes its recipient for significant contributions to cultural excellence.
Jones received the honor from Anna Wintour, global editorial director of Vogue and chief content officer of Condé Nast, who, before pinning the red-ribboned cross on the designer’s left lapel, over his heart, praised him for his generosity. “Our industry can tend to put ‘me’ before ‘we’, but not Kim Jones,” she told the crowd. (.
..) I can’t think of another designer where ‘team’ simply means colleagues and friends.
The two are virtually indistinguishable.” Wintour noted how, long before Demi Moore ’s career was reignited by The Substance , Jones had chosen her to open his Fendi show despite her then-underdog status. He shares with the late Karl Lagerfeld, she added, “a voracious lust for knowledge and a curiosity that is astounding.
” Kim is not only a designer, she observed, but a polymath—a botanist, zoologist, archaeologist, curator, historian and collector of art, books, people, Hermès Kelly bags, Star Wars baby Yoda figures, and works by the Bloomsbury group. “When it comes to what Kim loves, and what inspires him, there is no high and low, it’s all just joy,” she said. It would have been hard to imagine a more fitting venue for the ceremony than Le Laurent, whose history dates to the reign of Louis XIV, when it was the Sun King’s royal hunting lodge.
Since then, the place has been various things: during the Revolution, it was a dance hall. Today, thanks to the ministrations of Jones’s friend and colleague Cordélia de Castellane and the star chef Mathieu Pacaud, it is a sought-after restaurant among Paris’s movers and shakers. “I’m all about life and chapters,” Jones offered.
“I realized that it makes life feel longer. You look at things and you’re like, that chapter is great, that chapter might not be so great. This chapter is good, that next chapter will be exciting.
That’s how I view the world.” Jones sported his new medal under a “day pin” denoting the OBE (Order of the British Empire) he received in 2020 from Queen Elizabeth II. Asked what he felt he gave to the French, the designer replied, “I think it’s understanding the codes of their very important houses and respecting them.
Looking at the great French designers that have come before me, learning what they did and how they crafted clothing, and then implementing it for now. I think that’s the important thing.” Asked what other medal he might enjoy receiving, the designer replied without missing a beat: “I’d love to get the Danish one, because I’m half Danish.
” Fittingly enough, that one is the Order of the Elephant, one of the designer’s favorite animals. Until then, he said he’d be wearing the discreet little red ribbon pin that comes with the Légion d’Honneur every day. “I think it’s chic.
I’ve earned it. So..
. celebrate yourself!”.
