At the impressionable age of 14, Kim Jones, artistic director of Fendi’s women’s collection in addition to Dior Men, experienced a double epiphany when he was turned on both to fashion and to the multifaceted wonders of the Bloomsbury Group, the loose collective of forward-thinking creatives and intellectuals that shaped the look of British art and thought in the early 20th century. Jones’s passion for the latter began on a high school trip to Charleston farmhouse in Sussex, the hub of the group known for their unbridled creativity and their triangular relationships. As the schoolboy toured the house, layered with pattern and paint and charm, and drew in the gardens, famed for their exuberant plantings and spirited layering of colour, he thrilled to the idea of “all these people living together and living quite free lives”, as he puts it now. “Anyone who’s forward-thinking and changes the way society lives is interesting to me. That’s something that I’ve always stood for in my life: I want to live how I live, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”
In his refashioning of Fendi, Jones has taken a leaf from the Bloomsbury playbook, collaborating with the artisans of the brand’s legendary ateliers and working across disciplines with music-makers, artists and muses. His passion for fashion was born when his sister Nadia Jones, creative director of Australian brand Nique, bequeathed him her collection of magazines – invaluable chronicles of the innovative and often anarchic tastemakers emerging
