Virginia Woolf, Bella Hadid, and Kim Jones walk into a room. That’s the vibe Jones brought to Fendi couture with his highly anticipated debut for the Italian maison. In a year in which fashion took its rightful place on the back burner, the new creative director’s reimagining of Fendi gives us something to be excited about.
After leading Dior Men for three years and completing a tenure at Louis Vuitton (during the Supreme stint, of course), Jones took his transition from hyped-up menswear to couture womenswear literally. Citing Virginia Woolf as a major source of inspiration (Fendi is also presenting an exhibition of rare books and manuscripts to accompany the couture collection), Jones’s clothes blur gender lines with direct references to Orlando, Woolf’s novel which sees the protagonist switch from male to female mid-story with little explanation.
The resulting collection sees gowns spliced with tailored suits, clutches in the shape of books, quotes from the novel embroidered on accessories, and a pattern in the final looks pulled from the marble-bound books Woolf published with her husband Leonard Woolf for Hogarth Press.
The casting of the show presented the same level of thoughtfulness. Dandies wove through a complex glass maze wearing sweeping trains alongside every Super imaginable: Naomi Campbell, Bella Hadid, Christy Turlington, and Kate Moss and her daughter Lila Grace Moss Hack shared the stage, all faces familiar to the brand.
To further drive home the importance of fashion (and its androgynous fluidity), the show notes iterate a line from Orlando: “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.”
