Haute Couture SS21 Fendi
And here is finally the long-awaited debut of Kim Jones at the creative direction of Fendi. After his experience as Louis Vuitton and later as Dior Homme, the British designer makes his entrance into the Roman Maison led by Silvia Venturini Fendi. The Haute Couture catwalk was not the only debut for Jones; this, in fact, was also his first women’s collection.
For his very first womenswear collection, Jones returned to his origins, in the village of Rodmell, where he lived during his youth and now owns a property. The village was close to Charleston Farmhouse, the Sussex retreat of the “Bloomsbury”, a group of bohemian artists and writers founded in 1905 that shook the pillars of the Edwardian generation through evocative literary works, through art, and through highly innovative and pioneering essays. It goes without saying that among the members of Bloosmbury stood none other than the great Virginia Woolf.
“The movement and freedom of things were quite interesting to me,” Jones said. “I have friends that just buy couture clothes, and they don’t buy big ball gowns. They buy real clothes, things that fit their bodies”. This is how Jones’ work emerges clearly from his words. Inspired by the movement of Bloosmbury, he experimented the same exercise of freedom on clothes, by proposing clear and simple silhouettes, which adhere to the bodies and to the contemporary, easy to wear, genderless.
There are references to “Orlando” the novel Virginia Woolf published in 1928, just three years after Fendi was established, but also to “The journey from Bloosmbury to Borghese”, played by artists Vanessa Bell (Woolf’s sister) and Duncan Grant, through whom the references to the works of Galleria Borghese return, as the draperies of Bernini do.
There are also hybrid proposals, evening dresses combined on blazers or shirts. Amongst the models, the great Kate with her daughter Lila, Demi Moore, Christy and James Turlington. It’s certainly an experimental collection that opens the door to a revolutionary Fendi.
