Dior by Birkenstock appears to Christian Dior’s love of gardens

Christian Dior’s lifelong love of horticulture was born in childhood, watching his mom Madeleine have a tendency the backyard on the household’s seaside house, Villa Les Rhumbs in Granville, Normandy. Uncovered to the weather, the home’s windswept clifftop grounds nonetheless cultivated an edenic array of flora, together with Madeleine’s treasured rose backyard, the place over 20 varieties bloomed. Flowers would change into a perennial motif within the couturier’s work; later in life, he would domesticate a backyard of his personal at Le Moulin du Coudret, simply outdoors of Paris. ‘My life and elegance owe virtually the whole lot to Les Rhumbs,’ he stated. 

A century on, such flowers adorn the limited-edition Dior gardening sneakers created in a collaboration between the home’s menswear artistic director Kim Jones and historic German shoe producer Birkenstock. A riff on Birkenstock’s ergonomic Tokio Mule – a rubber mudguard and nubuck leather-based ankle strap are added to the unique type – the gray felt slippers mix decorative embellishment with utilitarian design, a stability Jones has struck in his menswear collections on the home up to now. Right here, delicate hand-embroidered flowers and foliage meet Jones’ futuristic aluminium ‘rollercoaster’ buckle – an expression of heritage and modernity directly.

Dior by Birkenstock

The collaboration was first revealed as a part of an A/W22 assortment through which Jones famous an imagined dialog with Monsieur Dior by means of the ‘virtuoso savoir-faire’ which defines the Parisian home – from flights of intricate embroidery and embellishment, to performs on the home founder’s seminal 1947 Bar jacket (which this 12 months celebrates its seventy fifth anniversary, see W*282). Different footwear kinds within the collaboration embrace the Tokio Mule in brown, greige and black nubuck calfskin, and a model of Birkenstock’s two-strap Milano sandal. Every pair is accomplished with a novel tread which melds Dior’s ‘Indirect’ monogram with Birkenstock’s ‘Bones’ motif, a symbolic union of two bastions of building and craft.