Travis Scott by Joshua Woods Talks Dior Men's Cactus Jack x Dior, Cactus Jack Foundation

American rapper Travis Scott is a very busy man. These images of Travis Scott lensed by Joshua Woods [IG] for Another Magazine’s Fall/Winter 2021 issue showcase clothes that he designed in collaboration with Dior’s Men’s Kim Jones for Spring 2022. Ellie Grace Cumming styles Scott with art direction by Marc Ascoli. / Hair by Mideyah Parker

Speaking to Emma Hope Allwood, Scott and Jones discuss their deep-rooted, far-reaching collaboration.

Travis Scott is the first celebrity since Michael Jordan in 1992 to create a McDonald’s meal. Scott’s creative collective Cactus Jack encompasses a record label, a publishing arm and an array of merchandise with graphics devised by him.

Through his Cactus Jack Foundation, Scott partnered with The New School’s Parsons School of Design to establish a fashion program, while launching his own scholarship program for historically black colleges and universities.

In September, Travis Scott spoke extensively about expanding the reach of Cactus Jack Foundation in its support of Black Lives Matter.

Scott’s connection to Dior is not new, Scott was a design input on the development of Jordan Brand’s Air Dior capsule collection.

The partnership, Cactus Jack x Dior is “the first full Dior collection ever created with a musician for the house,” noted the LVMH luxury brand in its blast off of the Dior Spring 2022 Menswear collection in June.

“Kim is a friend of mine. I probably wouldn’t be doing this if he wasn’t involved,” Scott says. “He is such an inspiration. I was a fan even when I was in college, so it’s crazy to be working with him. Going to the atelier and watching things being sewn and made by hand, it was insane.”

The collection is inspired by the desert landscapes of Texas, a nod to Scott’s home city of Houston and also a place house founder Christian Dior visited when he brought his debut collection to the United States in 1947.

There’s a strong undercurrent of Georgia O’Keefe in the Dior Menswear FW 2021 show visuals and the Joshua Wood’s photography for AnOther Magazine.

Maria Grazia Chiuri’s first cruise show for Dior in May 2017 the desert of Calabasas was inspired by Christian Dior’s travels into the American Southwest. The entire experience of Christian Dior’s Texas travels made a great impression on the designer who cited ‘the zest for life and self-confidence’. he found among the local population.

Another Magazine describes the visual effects of both the runway and photographic imagery around the collection this way: “As such, the set of the show offered a visual mash-up of Dior’s childhood rose garden in Normandy with an imaginary rendering of the Lone Star State – all fluorescent fibreglass cacti, larger-than-life bleached bison skulls and desert sand (no matter that Scott actually grew up in the lush Houston suburb of Missouri City). The colour of the clothes came from there too. “The pink is the sky over Houston, the green is the cactus, the brown is the soil,” shares Jones. “We tried to connect worlds and take where I’m from and the identity of Houston, Texas, and spread it across the collection,” Scott explains.

Returning with AnOther to reflect on his Cactus Jack Foundation, Scott shares a philanthropic element too: a series of shirts hand-painted by American artist George Condo will be sold to raise money for students scholarships in collaboration with Parsons in New York.

“I have been thinking about young people a lot recently. With the pandemic, it’s a very difficult time for them,” says Jones. “Studying, going to university, following their dreams, it’s all a lot more difficult today with Covid-19. And yet Dior is doing incredibly well in spite of this crisis. We need to use our power and the means at our disposal to support the kind of initiatives in which we believe.”

As Scott puts it, “I’m just a kid from Texas.” Maybe this collection will end up helping the next kid from Texas too.