Dior unveils capsule collection with Stone Island

French luxury fashion house Dior has unveiled a capsule collaboration with Italian heritage brand Stone Island that launches this July.

In a statement, Dior said the collaboration came from a “shared passion for perfection and excellence in processes and clothing shapes,” and celebrates the legacy of Christian Dior and that of Massimo Osti, the founder of Stone Island.

Headed by Dior Men’s creative director Kim Jones, the collection combines “the romance, rigor and history of the Parisian haute couture atelier” with that of the northern Italian fashion brand’s “mastery of machine processes and meticulous functional detailing".

“There is a meeting of Monsieur Dior and Massimo Osti’s work for Stone Island in this collection – it is the coming together of ‘obsessives,’ explained Jones. “They might have been people from opposite ends of the fashion spectrum – from an haute couture vision to that of military functionality – yet I think they’d recognise something in each other and in what they achieved through clothing. Here, in the coming together of contrasting traditions, there’s a kind of clothing alchemy.”

The collection merges the haute couture roots and tailoring traditions of Dior with the functionality and utilitarian shapes of Stone Island to create a masculine clothing collection featuring ready-to-wear, footwear and accessories.

Highlights include a black lambskin aged effect field jacket, which takes inspiration from a 20th-century aviator style, featuring a joint Dior and Stone Island badge, black and grey bomber jackets adorned with embroidered flowers, and a patch and pocket-heavy parkas, waistcoats and cargo trousers.

The collection also features a series of signs and symbols that unite the houses in the collection, from the discreet to the more direct, including Dior’s ‘double pleat’ tailoring motif and Stone Island’s ‘dutch rope’ system for attaching and detaching.