This was the scene at Dior Men: a vast box, the color of Dior gray flannel on the outside, black on the inside, with almost airport-size moving walkway sunk into it instead of a runway. The models stood stock-still on the conveyor belt, forming a human frieze in which Kim Jones moved menswear to a brilliantly lit place where a vision of classical cut, youth, and modernity finally gelled. “The idea was they became like statues, standing there as they do in the couture salon,” Jones said.

Tailoring is, of course, the subject du jour in menswear, but how to place a suit in a context that both honors tradition and convinces a new generation is another matter. Jones cracked the conundrum by bringing together the gendered sides of the capabilities that reside under the roof of this house—the Dior uniform of the corporate businessman and politician’s suit, and the draping in 3-D that is the expertise of the women’s haute couture.

It was breathtaking to see how he crystallized the two in a single, elegant gesture of integrating a stole into tailored jackets and formal coats. Half-scarf, half-sash, they attached to the inside of a lapel, crossed the body, wrapped like a cummerbund, and spilled the excess nonchalantly to one side. “That idea came from looking at the cut of a 1955 dress in the Dior archive,” he said. “But I wanted it to have ease and elegance.”

Jones is skilled at layering his references, and tethering them back to French culture. Take the sportswear structures of vests and utilitarian workwear that appeared throughout. The heavily beaded vest with what looked like a cat’s face—what Jones called a “tactical jacket”—turned out not to have been inspired by the gilets jaunes, or footage of police countering them. Actually, he’d been looking at the statues to French heroes and statesmen in parks and buildings around Paris. “I noticed how many of them are wearing armor.”

That might have triggered the more perverse-looking bits and pieces: the leather gauntlets gone S-M, the harnessing, the saddlebag made in black nylon. Or was that a soupçon of Helmut Lang in the ’90s?

But references, references—anyone can have references! The point of the exercise is to get to the place where it’s all funneled into a newly relevant, on-point aesthetic. This collection, shown on its lanky, long-haired, beautiful androgynes projected a classy louche minimalism we haven’t quite seen before. It felt like an almost historic turning of a page.

There are footnotes: all the zebra and panther prints, nodding to Christian Dior’s menagerie of favorite patterns; the art-souvenir collaboration of the season with Raymond Pettibon. But almost, it’s a bad thing to have too much to mention. The main thing fashion needs as a whole is for smart, skilled leaders—as in politics, as in life—to be definite and clear about an inspiring direction of travel. Kim Jones showed he’s in that class, tonight.