There is one Aman item that money cannot buy. After a guest’s fifth stay, the hotels hand it over: a T-shirt declaring the wearer an “Aman Junkie,” the name the travel press gave to the devotees who plan their calendars around the group’s 36 properties. “You cannot purchase that,” says Kim Jones, who has one, and who has slept in some 30 Amans as one of its Top 5 clients. At most of them he has also bought the cap emblazoned with the hotel’s logo. The caps live in a cupboard in London, where his housekeeper once organized them by color. “I was like, no,” Jones says. “They were in continent order!”
It is hard to imagine a more Kim Jones statement. It also explains why his recently launched collection for Aman Essentials, the hotel group’s lifestyle arm, feels inevitable. Jones has never been a designer who happens to collect. He is a collector who happens to design, and his first school was a stockroom.