Kate Moss
Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott 

 

Kim Jones Reveals His Deeply Personal Debut Fendi Couture Collection For “Pioneering Women” 

As its newly appointed artistic director of womenswear, Kim Jones is bringing a deeply personal, British sensibility to Fendi. In an exclusive preview of his debut couture collection, Jones talks to Olivia Singer about drawing inspiration from the Bloomsbury Group, while Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott photograph Kate Moss dressed in his designs, styled by Edward Enninful, at Charleston, the artistic set’s Sussex home. 

BY Olivia Singer
23 January 2021

Instead of sitting amid the high-vaulted, light-drenched glamour of the Fendi ateliers to talk with Kim Jones about his first collection for the Roman house, we go for a country walk in Sussex on an awfully grey day prior to lockdown, blustery and bleak with thick mists rendering it almost dark in mid-afternoon. We’re a long way from the Italian capital, where scores of seamstresses are in the process of weaving lattices of pearls and ornately embroidering couture gowns for his upcoming debut, but, nonetheless, it soon makes a lovely sort of sense. Jones recently bought a holiday home here, in the quiet village of Rodmell – a stone’s throw from the house where he spent much of his upbringing, and a few doors down from Virginia Woolf’s cottage – and he’s brought me here to give me a tour of his childhood. “As a teenager, I spent a lot of time cycling round all these villages,” he smiles, sidestepping a growling tractor. “This first collection feels almost autobiographical. What I’m referencing feels really personal.”