FASHION
DIOR’S KIM JONES
COLLABORATES WITH GHANAIAN ARTIST AMOAKO BOAFO
JULY 14, 2020
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WORDS
by KRISTOPHER FRASER
PHOTOS
COURTESY of DIOR
For Dior men’s spring/summer 2021 collection, the brand’s menswear artistic director collaborated with Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo for a series that was an homage to beauty of African culture and heritage. Boafo was trained as an artist in Vienna where he began creating work that created intimate cultural conversations. Boafo first met Kim Jones at the Rubell Museum in Miami in 2019, and it was a moment that was described as love at first sight. Both of the two creatives have a very strong mutual respect for each other’s work.
Jones has a personal relationship with Africa dating back to his youth. Growing up, his father was a hydro-geologist who travelled the world for work, which allowed Jones to be exposed to various countries in Africa including Ghana, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Botswana. The African continent has also been a constant source of inspiration for Dior throughout the fashion house’s history and Jones’ personal history as a designer.
Dior Spring/Summer 2021
Boafo is constantly inspired by Ghana’s capital city, Accra, which has a rich textile history. He is known for taking every day concepts and reimagining them into something extraordinary for his original artworks. His celebrated Black Diaspora Portraits are explorations of his own identity and perceptions of Blackness — specifically Black masculinity. For the collaboration with Dior, Boafo transposed his works, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, onto garments that brought together his artistic techniques with couture level design techniques.
Each piece is a collaboration between Boafo and Jones, and everything from the shapes, prints, and colors all act as a dialogue between the two creatives. Some signature colors in the collection include yellow, blue, coral, and green. The prints in the collection are drawn from the graphic patterns that characterize Boafo’s work. A jacquard of paintbrush strokes is based on a photograph taken by Kim Jones of the textured canvasses in his studio. In other pieces, embroideries, knitwear, and intarsia translate specifics by Boafo onto the models bodies, with silhouettes kept slim and sporty, which Jones has kept characterize during his tenure at Dior.
