The White Room

Kris Van Assche’s fall 2010 Dior Homme collection is a triumphant affirmation of the house’s aesthetic for the new decade: clean lines, translucent layers of fabric, deconstructionist touches and oversized silhouettes. Quietly iconoclastic, it's a tempting  and elegant proposition for men who have grown out of their skinny jeans. The standout piece of the collection is the floor-length trench, a deceptively light garment that undulated elegantly down the runway in Paris in June. Unveiled under a ring of fluorescent lights, accompanied by the Sisters of Mercy’s “Temple of Love,” the piece mixes bold 80s power dressing with the swaddled folds of fabric Van Assche had witnessed in Indian dress on a trip to the country last August. The collection’s sensuous feeling of movement provided the inspiration for today’s film, created to mark the occasion of Dior Homme's first UK flagship, which opened this week in the Westfield Center, London. The entrancing vignette is styled by Robbie Spencer and directed by photographer Sharif Hamza, who conceived it as “something like a fashion show that never happened,” setting it in a mysterious, bleached corridor (recreated from a Polaroid of an anonymous interior that had been lying on Hamza’s desk for some months). According to Hamza, the film creates a “dialogue without words,” in which nuanced glances and a slowly advancing zoom lens come together for a mysterious, cinematic experience.

Also today: Kris Van Assche talks through his fall 2010 Dior Homme collection, answering your questions from Twitter and Facebook. Read the interview here.