The long-awaited debut of Kim Jones with Fendi has finally arrived.
At the Palais Brongniart in Paris was staged the presentation (digital) of the Fendi Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2021 collection, the first designed by the British fashion designer, new creative director of the Roman Maison.
The entire collection draws inspiration from the charisma of the artists and students who were part of the Bloomsbury Group, a group that began in 1905 as an informal social gathering of recent Cambridge University graduates who met in the Bloomsbury district – where Kim Jones spent much of her childhood – in London. The works of its members, including the Scottish painter Duncan Grant, the painter Vanessa Bell and the most famous exponent, the writer and activist Virginia Woolf, influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism and economics, as well as feminism, pacifism and sexuality.
“As vain as the nonsense may sound, it is said that clothes have more important functions than just keeping us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us”, this is what Virginia Woolf wrote in Orlando and it is with these words that this new chapter for Fendi opens. Romanticism, timeless creativity, the fluidity of genre are the main elements that characterize the collection that merges completely with the world of Bloomsbury also thanks to the readings of family and friends of the Fendi family, starting from Silvia Venturini Fendi as the letters of Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, while the works of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell are transformed into embroidery on the clothes.
The legacy of the Maison is not at all neglected, on the contrary, in the collection we find the colors of the marble of the Galleria Borghese in Rome as well as the drape of Bernini’s sculptures, the archives of the brand and the historical sketches are at the center of the collection and define it giving it continuity.
On the catwalk, we find an incredible cast, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Demi Moore, Christy Turlington, Bella Hadid and Cara Delevingne, a choice that is a bridge between past, present and future without ever forgetting its identity and that reflects the will of Kim Jones in this his first collection for a historic fashion house like Fendi.
