Dior Men

Dior’s menswear division began as Christian Dior Monsieur, founded in 1969 by Marc Bohan, then creative director of the women’s and haute couture line of the Paris house Christian Dior SA. The original proposition was modest, a men’s wardrobe attached to a couture house defined by womenswear.

That changed in 2000, when the menswear line was renamed Dior Homme under the creative direction of Hedi Slimane from the fall and winter 2001 to 2002 season, and the label introduced a slim silhouette which soon took off within the fashion industry.

As one critic later put it, Dior had been a house built on womenswear and couture, with no default menswear setting until Slimane reduced the men’s silhouette to razor-sharp proportions that defined the look of the 2000s.

Menswear became the laboratory where Dior tested a new male figure. Slicing through the baggy, ill-fitted tailoring popular in menswear at the time, Dior Homme arrived with razor-sharp tailoring, skinny silhouettes and the smoky allure of its boys strutting down the runway with a lick of eyeliner on, far from Versace’s ripped, Zeus-like figures of masculinity, or the grungy nihilism of Calvin Klein.

The clothes were narrow black suiting, tapered trousers, white shirts, and lean leather outerwear. The cut was so reductive that the super-lean fit of Slimane’s Dior Homme suiting appealed to designer Karl Lagerfeld so greatly that in 2001 he lost over 88 pounds in order to wear it, an industry anecdote that came to stand in for the line’s wider influence.

Under Kris Van Assche, who succeeded Slimane in 2007, the design language widened. Infusing streetwear tropes into the house’s atelier and splicing formal and sports codes, Van Assche inserted sweatshirts, pleated pants, deconstructed suiting, bomber jackets and his own take on the dad shoe into the lineup.

The line has changed name and direction with each leadership shift. In 2018, the first big move by Pietro Beccari, the newly installed chairman and CEO of Christian Dior Couture, was to install Kim Jones as artistic director after Van Assche stepped down following 11 years at the brand.

From 2018 to 2025, Jones served as artistic director, and under his leadership the menswear line changed its name to Dior Men in March 2018. His tenure pulled the house toward collaboration culture, with projects alongside KAWS, Travis Scott, Daniel Arsham, Stüssy and others, dressing a younger global customer alongside the existing tailoring clientele.

Dior named Jonathan Anderson as creative director on April 17, 2025 following his exit from LOEWE. The line now sits in the upper tier of Paris menswear, alongside Louis Vuitton and Celine, dressing a customer who buys both a black two-button suit and a logo hoodie from the same house.