Kim Jones Turns to the Bright Side at Dior Men

KAWS, the American street artist, created an enormous floral statue of his BFF character recast as Dior and his beloved dog, Bobby, for the centerpiece of the runway Saturday, something unimaginable under the earlier regime. He redesigned the house’s signature bee motif, too, more approachable and adorable in its cartoony new iteration.

“I just feel like he’s a really important artist for the generation now,” Mr. Jones said.

“You look at things like Hypebeast, and he crosses into them — it’s more culture than art. Things like that interest me. So I asked him to do the set and to redesign the bee for us because I thought it was a nice way to start a new era.”

His is a softer, elegant, more feminine Dior, one that effectively sidesteps the moody, razor-edged styling of its two previous designers, Kris Van Assche and Hedi Slimane, to look back to the life of Dior himself. There are the flowers; there is logo-print lace; there are suits in a swooping, kimono-like cut drawn from Dior’s 1950s women’s wear; there is one surprising one in the petal pink of Dior’s childhood home in Granville, France. In a streetwear-mad moment, Mr. Jones, the man who brought the street into the ateliers of Louis Vuitton, is going another way.

“I know what people are buying,” he said. “You can see it when you look at sales reports. You can look at it when you go in the street. But I think it’s nice to have something fresh like this. I think it’s important.