All a Bit Punk: Louis Vuitton, Tod’s and Hood by Air

PARIS — Journeymen get a bad rap. Heads down, they perform with efficiency the tasks they are handed, take the check and go home. Seldom are they known for diva tantrums.

In the case of Kim Jones, home is merely a stopover, a place (actually, there are two, one in London and another on the beautiful Place des Victoires in Paris) to stow the luggage he carries on his continual travels.

And his job as the creative director for men’s wear at Louis Vuitton, which he’s held for the past five years, is the paycheck that lets him indulge his wanderlust. That doesn’t mean he phones it in, any more than that his travels are part of a fashion thematic. They define him, as a human and as a designer. His restless spirit and eye inform what he brings to the workroom.

And so the many journeys he has made over the past year to Africa (“It’s an easy flight and it’s on the same time zone,” he said backstage before his show on Friday, held in the sculpture garden of the Palais Royal. “I can go to South Africa for a weekend.”) logically informed a collection that fused the spirit of the Punk clothes and memorabilia Mr. Jones avidly collects with motifs from both traditional black African cultures and the hybridized multiracial urban one so vividly evident in contemporary Cape Town.

On paper, those elements would not be obvious choices for goods produced for a global luxury-good behemoth. Yet Mr. Jones’s success at the house — he has produced one unexpected hit collection after another; notably that based on designs of the obscure British designer Christopher Nemeth — requires a workmanlike understanding of the brief.