Since Fendi revealed that Kim Jones will carry on Karl Lagerfeld’s position as Women’s Creative Director, the fashion world has already been eager to see just what Jones would do. It is indeed a momentous occasion, not just for Fendi, but rather for Jones, who has never made an entire women’s line or fashion concept. He has so far been Louis Vuitton’s menswear director for seven years; he seems to have been Dior Men’s Artistic Director until 2018.
Through both roles, he took the LVMH-owned labels into yet another new paradigm by combining street style with conventional hosiery. As a kind of emphasis on his conversion to women’s clothes, Jones said that most of his sources of inspiration for the line have been Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a narrative about gender theory, and Woolf’s Vita Sackville-West. “Fendi represents the artisanal quality of the highest order, and it is all about family,” Jones stated earlier in the show notes.
“It is in its third generation with a Fendi at its helm, and I am guest starring while bringing in the fourth. Here, I am surrounded by strong, powerful women who I love and respect, and want to bring their energy into what I do.”
At such an era when design debates were swinging between some of the extremes of the victory of sports and Zoom’s styles to mesmerize culturally distant runway frames, this range was a spectacular reminder of the emotional effect that genuinely glamorous clothes could have. Every model strolled out to the Max Richter groove in the middle of glass towers and made its way to its own—surely a homage to the loneliness that we are all feeling at the start of 2021. Yet translucent crystal lattice skirts, a dress that mixes menswear and quartz dandelions, and romantic dresses, acted as pure hope.
The collection highlights started with a quotation from Virginia Woolf, whose longtime mansion was only down the main sidewalk from Jones’ British country house, where he undertook most of the design and implementation that contributed to the display. He explained, “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.”
For somebody who spent many months making menswear, Jones unveiled a line that acts as a love poem to women, particularly nostalgic note-making, and to Fendi’s house and family, including Silvia Fendi, the only Fendi sister currently employed inside the company. “It is in its third generation with a Fendi at its helm, and I am guest starring while bringing in the fourth,” he said. “Here, I am surrounded by strong, powerful women who I love and respect, and want to bring their energy into what I do.”
