Kim Jones on His New Limited Edition Sneaker and Bottle With Hennessy

To Kim Jones, designing a decanter isn’t that different from designing a dress. “Look at the shape,” he says while sitting in a suite at New York’s Aman hotel, and gesturing to a bar stocked with the spirit nearby. “You can see the form—there’s the neck, there’s the body. It’s all there.”

So it’s no surprise that when Hennessy X.O asked the Dior Men and Fendi artistic director to craft a limited edition cognac collection for the brand, he approached it in a similar way to his process with fashion: First, a trip to the Hennessy archives. There, a selection of early 20th-century bottles, covered in crinkling parchment, caught his eye. “I thought—well, that’s kind of like fabric,” he says.

Both materials, Jones concluded, would be too impractical for this venture. So he dreamt up an aluminum encasement, with a wrapped design reminiscent of the waxy papers from decades past. He then used 3-D printing to make it a reality, before folding it around the bottle much like he would a mannequin or model. “I approached it like I would drape a couture dress on the body,” Jones notes.