Styling
Here I want to show the full silhouettes that come from combining the pieces introduced in the Combination section.
At the end, I’ve also included a winter pairing built around the slim-fit jeans. (Different pieces, from an earlier article.)
For this shoot, I raised the exposure to bring out the detail in the black clothing. The highlights ended up a bit blown out, and even after adjusting things in Lightroom, the photos still carry a slight haze.
Please bear with the difference in mood between these and the reference photos shot in winter.
1. Paired with a White Tee
A white tee with slim black jeans is about as close to ultimate minimalism as it gets — there’s nothing left to strip away. From there, the fun is in deciding what to add on top of that base.
2. Le Mont St Michel Moleskin Jacket
Building on the white tee and slim black jeans above, I’ve layered in the Le Mont St Michel moleskin jacket. With the palette held to just white and black, and the whole silhouette kept tight, the minimalist world Dior proposes comes through clearly.
3. Boncoura’s Hooded Parka
On top of the minimal base of a white tee and black slim jeans, I’ve added a black hooded parka. The parka is a size 36 — one size down — which keeps the styling from coming apart.
Because the proportions are balanced, the styling holds together even with the front zipper closed. If the brass zipper were instead made of stainless steel or some other silver-toned metal, I suspect it would pair even better.
4. Tom Ford’s Black Viscose Tee
For the tee, I went with a black Henley neck. Pulling everything together in a single tone of black brings out the minimalism even more strongly than a white tee does. Black is the most slimming of colors, so the whole silhouette reads tighter.
Choosing black for the tee as well takes the whole look to all black — a taut, disciplined style with real tension to it.
4. Form
The fit through the hips, balanced against the length of the front zip and the slightly deep rise, is what makes the legs look so clean.
The carefully calculated shape through the hips makes the seat look smaller — and that same engineering lets even someone middle-aged wear them and still come away with a youthful silhouette.
A Winter Pairing
Because this shoot took place in the spring/summer season, the pieces I’ve paired here are also spring/summer items. For reference, I’ve also included pairings with the fall/winter pieces I wore through last winter and covered in earlier pieces.
A Dior-on-Dior pairing comes together with the best balance of all. The Dior peacoat reads at a glance as a boxy shape, but the silhouette underneath it is worked out with real precision — put it on, and it turns remarkably stylish.
[ The Dior Cashmere Peacoat piece ]
This pairs Dior, which is unforgiving about what it sits next to, with Brunello Cucinelli, which is far more accommodating. The look puts Dior’s slim-fit jeans together with a Brunello Cucinelli biker jacket and boots — and with Brunello Cucinelli effectively setting the terms, it all comes together with real style.
[ The Brunello Cucinelli Biker Jacket piece ]
At a glance these look like nothing more than slim black jeans, but once on, they do real work — expressing the minimalist world Dior is proposing in a way few other pieces manage. The one thing to keep in mind: the line through the leg takes on Dior’s own particular slim silhouette, so they’re particular about what they go with.
Detail
* Excerpted from Dior’s official website.
Slim-fit Jeans
- Iconic Dior topstitching on the back pockets
- Leather patch with the debossed Dior signature
- Belt loops
- Five-pocket styling
- Zip fly with button fastening
- 98% cotton, 2% elastodiene
- Slim fit
- Mid-rise
- Leg opening: 17 cm (size 31)
- Dior Slim-fit Jeans, inseam: 98 cm (size 31)
- Made in Italy
- * The pair shown in this piece is my size, 30
Pairings
- Slim-fit jeans (black): Dior
- T-shirt (white): Tom Ford
- Henley-neck T-shirt (black): Tom Ford
- Work jacket (moleskin, black): Le Mont St Michel
- Hooded parka (black): Boncoura
- Hat: COMES AND GOES
- Cap: ’47
- Belt: Hender Scheme
- Boots: Visvim
- Watch: Richard Lange, A. Lange & Söhne
In Closing
I never imagined that I’d end up wearing slim-fit black jeans — a piece I’d always felt out of place in — this close to sixty. When Dior takes them on, they become something that holds onto a rock-leaning edge while still expressing a refined minimalism.
The styling reads slim, but the silhouette is clean rather than extreme, so they’re not nearly as tight or hard to wear as I’d expected going in. I’d recommend them to anyone who wants to enjoy Dior’s minimalist world for themselves.
The one thing that still throws me off is how narrow they run below the knee, around the calf — different from a straight-fit jean. That said, it’s mostly a matter of getting used to it; once you do, it stops standing out.
Even with such a clean, slim silhouette, the medium rise — which actually runs fairly deep — leaves real room through the waist. They look slim, but the waist actually feels roomier than a Levi’s 501 or a Lee 101Z in the same size.
What makes them hard to style comes down to this: you have to recognize that they carry their own self-contained world, and choose what goes with them accordingly.
Forever Young
Dior’s slim-fit jeans briefly disappeared from the official website after Jonathan Anderson took over as the new designer, but they’ve recently come back, and now in more variations than before.
They started out, after all, as a style Hedi Slimane proposed twenty years ago — and I find myself imagining that, world view included, it must be a piece every designer who followed him has had to wrestle with.
I sense an unstated theme running through the world Hedi Slimane proposed: forever young. As I wrote in an earlier piece, Karl Lagerfeld — a titan of Paris mode who was himself well past sixty — lost some forty kilograms just to be able to wear Dior, and kept wearing it for the rest of his life. My own answer to why is this: it wasn’t about mode or fashion as such, but something more fundamental — that he took on Dior’s minimalism as a way of expressing forever young. (Just my own reading of it, though.)
This piece is a concentration of Hedi Slimane’s sharp instincts — the same instincts that took rock fashion and hebimeta, the kind of culture and style that grips you in your youth and draws sideways looks from the adult world, and folded it into Paris mode.
Shop
I bought the slim-fit black jeans featured here at House of Dior Ginza, in Ginza Six. I’ve written more about the shop itself in the button-down shirt piece, so have a look there for more detail.