HE LAUNCHED A HAIRCUT (THE FAUX HAWK) and made tight, low-slung jeans and skinny suits the epitome of cool, compelling a famous couturier (Karl Lagerfeld) to shed more than 90 pounds in order to shimmy into his spare, exacting threads. Since arriving at Christian Dior almost seven years ago, Hedi Slimane has created a vivid new image for a French house with a faint men’s wear heritage. In the process, he has put Dior Homme at the vortex of the music and contemporary art worlds, and transformed himself into a design star of his generation.
For all his accomplishments, rigor and confidence, Slimane has the perpetual wallflower comportment: hands stuffed into his pockets; shoulders hunched to his ears; big, haunting blue eyes raised sheepishly. Yet like his innovative tailoring, his opinions are precise and uncompromising.
Ensconced in a favorite but un-trendy Left Bank cafe the day after his latest runway show, Slimane, 38, reflected on his career at Dior, delighting in the fact that historically the brand’s women’s wear prominence was not eclipsed by the men’s department. “I joined the house [because of that],” he said matter-of-factly, his hair these days combed forward into a shock of short, thick bangs. “It was a total blank slate as opposed to Yves Saint Laurent, no matter what had been done at Christian Dior Monsieur.”
An art history graduate from the Ecole du Louvre, Slimane burst onto the fashion scene in the late Nineties as the men’s wear creative director at YSL, where his seductive, androgynous style caught the industry’s attention. Although the Paris men’s shows had long been an afterthought on the international fashion circuit, Slimane’s YSL shows became a must-attend event for the cognoscenti.
But when Gucci Group acquired YSL in 1999, Slimane balked at a hierarchy that had him reporting to then-group creative director Tom Ford. In spring 2000, he resigned from YSL to pursue talks about a Gucci-backed signature collection. Prada Group also courted Slimane to take over Jil Sander, but he ultimately accepted an offer from Bernard Arnault, kingpin of the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton luxury empire, to join in the rejuvenation of Dior, which was already kicking into high gear with the arrival of couturier John Galliano.
Although the house introduced men’s neckties as early as 1950 and has been offering made-to-measure suits to a male clientele for decades — even suiting up Marlene Dietrich — its men’s wear heritage is comparatively sparse. Christian Dior Monsieur was launched in 1970 when Marc Bohan was the couturier, and the men’s department has been headed by a series of designers, many of them tapped from Lanvin.
Before Slimane’s arrival, the men’s business was substantial and global, but mostly licensed and associated with a mature, bourgeois clientele.
With his electrifying debut Dior show in January 2001 — attended by the likes of Yves Saint Laurent, Catherine Deneuve, John Galliano and Cate Blanchett — Slimane began constructing a new brand based on modernist rigor and youthful verve. With scant clothing archives to mine, the designer said his starting blocks were in the realm of ideas — Dior’s couture pedigree and a certain posture associated with one of its central claims to fame: the New Look suiting known as tailleur bar.
“I think the name is so institutional, it can apply to many things. It’s like a state of mind, a home. That is what is fascinating,” said Slimane, dressed in a tight pinstripe jacket, small-collared shirt, black jeans and laced military boots straight from his runway. “It was about creating the men’s wear at Dior, what it could be, what it could represent. I wanted Dior Homme to be an expression of masculinity.”
The execution of those concepts was as crystal clear as the needle-like beats of electronic music that accompanied his early shows and filtered into his design studio and boutique, all gleaming lacquer, steel and strong, horizontal lines. Yet in addition to his penchant for strict, almost surgical minimalism, Slimane has a strong affinity for rich classicism, too, which is why he chose Richard Avedon to shoot the first Dior Homme ad campaign (more character study than fashion shoot), and why he prefers lunching in the gilded, ornate Paris restaurants of palace hotels like the Ritz, Meurice or Crillon.
Slimane immediately conceived Dior Homme in a larger cultural and creative context, and he began commissioning musicians to compose music for his shows and contemporary artists to create fitting rooms, from Doug Aitken and Pierre Huyghe to Olafur Eliasson. “For me, it’s like a forum, like a community of thinking,” he explained. “I should not be the only person to have an idea about Dior Homme.”
Still, by virtue of his fashion impact, Slimane is the central, asparagus-thin figure of Dior Homme, known for casting ever thinner and younger models from the streets of London and Berlin for his shows.
“It’s all about the models — the character in the clothes,” he said. “If I notice somebody on the street, it’s because of his allure, his style. I [design the collection] directly on them. The clothes have the names of the boys inside.”
And Slimane is unrepentant if people assume his clothes can only be worn by the very young and the very thin. “I really don’t care,” he stated. “It’s not so much about being skinny or not. The sense of fit and proportion is what is important.…In men’s wear, a lot of things became tighter, so everybody thinks it’s normal….You just have to try it. When I started at YSL, I was asked all the time about comfort. No one asks anymore.”
As for any accusations of ageism in his design approach, Slimane retorted, “Older people want to look younger. Vitality comes from young people. You can’t fight that.”
Men’s wear currently represents about 10 percent of Dior’s business worldwide, and as much as 20 percent in Japan.
Lagerfeld, forever hungry for the new, quickly became one of Slimane’s most famous and loyal customers when he decided to shed his oversize Yohji Yamamoto layers — and his own — to get into Slimane’s stick-to-the-ribs tailoring. One LVMH executive, encountering racks and racks of Dior Homme suits on display at Lagerfeld’s home, asked if he was starting a men’s line.
Slimane’s clothes have also appeared on countless rock stars, from Bryan Ferry and Mick Jagger to Justin Timberlake and Pete Doherty, the Babyshambles frontman who was the focus of one of Slimane’s collectible photo books, “London: Birth of a Cult.” Sensing electronic music had reached an impasse, and finding live performances more exciting in a post-9/11 world craving humanity, contact and sharing, Slimane has been a keen follower and documenter of the burgeoning indie movement of bands like Franz Ferdinand, the Libertines and These New Puritans.
Music he commissioned from Razorlight for a 2005 show later went on to top the U.K. singles chart, and that collection, dubbed “glam rock” by Slimane and featuring live drummers for the finale, remains the designer’s personal favorite. “There was a freedom in that collection. It was just when the scene was emerging,” he said. “It was a moment. I like it when it’s that joyful.”
The designer contends the music scene remains the main realm where new hairstyles, proportions and footwear styles can emerge — and it has an impact on graphic design, too. “I don’t see any other creative territory that could allow men’s wear to evolve,” he said. “It’s so connected to street culture and music. It’s popular culture; that’s what fashion is, anyway.”
Since 2003, Slimane has also applied his exacting sensibility to Dior’s beauty universe, creating a start-to-finish range of exclusive “old school” colognes, a successful Dior Homme fragrance for wider distribution and a new skin care range, dubbed Dermo System, that is rolling out worldwide this year. The designer said his approach was to provide “a strong olfactive idea for men” and to base products on quality and luxurious ingredients, “not make it out of a focus group.”
Although negotiations to conclude a new Dior Homme contract were not yet concluded at press time, Slimane said he remained smitten with fashion, even as his photography and art projects continue to multiply. “Fashion is still a place where creative people have to move so fast,” he observed. “It’s really challenging. It’s not like producing an album and living with it for a couple of years.”