CZ8 Meets the Athletes at Dior Men Winter 2024

For Aurélien Giraud, the Lyonnaise skateboarder, personal style is all about what he feels good in. “I love to be comfortable in my daily life”, the 25-year-old says, before continuing: “I really love sober clothing”. His career, on the other hand, has been anything but. “When I was young, I started as a kid with rollerblading”, he says. “But when I went to the skatepark, I saw all these older skateboarders, and I wanted to do the same thing. One week after, my father got me my first deck”. He was four years old. In the years following, Giraud has built up a reputation as one of the best street skateboarders around, winning the Street League Skateboarding Tampa Am contest in Florida in 2015, and the Street World Championships in 2022.

Sasha Zhoya, the French hurdler, first got into athletics as a child. “It was via my sister. I was the younger brother, and used to always follow in her footsteps”, the Australian-born track and field star says. “She brought to me my competitive nature – from being on the track trying to break her records, to being at home competing in the silliest of things, like who can eat dinner the fastest”. This competitive nature has propelled Zhoya to break records throughout his junior career. Outside of hurdling, he likes to spend his time “creating music or brainstorming ideas in my handbook of projects”, and has a keen interest in fashion.

Of Dior Men’s Winter 2024 collection, Zhoya says: “Dior is the first fashion show that I’ve been to, and I can confidently say I think it will be hard to beat. I’ve always been watching behind-the-screens, dreaming of what it would be like to attend a show, and today’s show exceeded my expectations – it was a dream-like experience”.

“To be the best in judo, we train for many hours to make sure we’re technically, physically, and mentally as strong as possible”, the 32-year-old judoka Alexandre Iddir says of his sport. “But all aspects of performance are optimized: food, sleep, and so on”. This attention to detail and quest for perfection is something Iddir recognises in Kim Jones’ work at Dior. “When I visited the Dior Showroom, I realised that although the clothes were obviously magnificent, the whole experience was perfect: from the Haussmannian architecture to the precision and luxury service from the professionals… everything was perfect”.

Perfection is the word on surfer Kauli Vaast lips also. For him, the Dior Men show – and Paris Fashion Week in general, his first – was priceless. “When you step in a new world with this level of perfection, at night you go to bed with memories”, the 21-year-old says. Vaast has been surfing since he was a child in Tahiti, and has always been something he’s excelled at, winning the WSL European Junior Championships in 2017, 2019, and 2020. He qualified for the Olympics at the 2023 ISA World Surfing Games, and hopes to win gold at Paris 2024 – where the surfing finals will be held in his birthplace of French Polynesia.