Last fall, at the Financial Times’s luxury summit in Hong Kong, the British designer Kim Jones leveraged both the platform and locale to recast his career. After 15 years inside the LVMH machine, at Dior and Fendi, Jones was embarking on a new journey as a philosopher-king of the Asian luxury market—a vision befitting his still-new post as creative director of Areal, the premium line of Bosideng, the Chinese outerwear giant that specializes in down jackets. “Whenever I’m designing, Asia is always one of my main priorities,” Jones said in a social media video promoting the event. “I think about their craft, their history, and the talent of local craftsmen and how we can entwine them with what we do. I’m loving working with Asia at the moment because the factories are so new and they have so much new technology. … For me, it’s like looking at the future.”