## The Fitting Room

The Fitting Room

Kim Jones stands in a first-floor atelier at Fendi's Via Solari headquarters, one hand resting on a bolt of double-faced cashmere the colour of wet stone. A sample coat hangs on a form behind him — sleeves set high, lapels narrow, the whole thing shaped like something Marcello Mastroianni might have worn in 1964 if Mastroianni had been six-foot-two and partial to technical fabrications. Jones tilts his head, considers the drape, then reaches for a pin box. He doesn't say much. The room is quiet except for the hiss of steam from an iron in the corner.

This is his method: arrive early, stay late, work through the sample in silence with the première and her team. He has been Fendi's artistic director of womenswear and couture since September 2020, following Karl Lagerfeld's thirty-six-year tenure and a brief interlude under Silvia Venturini Fendi's solo stewardship. The appointment surprised some. Jones had built his reputation in menswear — first at Dunhill, then at Louis Vuitton Homme, then at Dior Homme. But Bernard Arnault, who rarely telegraphs his reasoning, saw something others didn't: a designer whose technical fluency and nomadic curiosity might translate Fendi's Roman classicism into a language legible to a generation raised on streetwear and cross-category collaborations.

Three years in, the translation is ongoing.

Training

Jones was born in London in 1974, raised partly in Botswana, Ethiopia, and Ecuador. His father worked in hydrology; the family moved often. By the time he enrolled at Central Saint Martins in the early nineties, he had accumulated a visual archive most designers spend years chasing — textiles from Addis Ababa markets, the geometry of Ndebele beadwork, the way light falls differently at altitude. His graduate collection, shown in 2002, featured hand-beaded bombers and parkas trimmed with shearling. John Galliano attended the show. So did Sophia Kokosalaki, who would later hire him as a design assistant.

The Central Saint Martins cohort of that era — Jones, Giles Deacon, Marios Schwab, Christopher Kane — shared a certain pragmatism. They understood that fashion was both art and industry, and that survival required fluency in both registers. Jones worked briefly at Alexander McQueen, then moved to Umbro, where he learned to design for volume and price point. In 2008, Alfred Dunhill named him creative director. He was thirty-three.

The Dunhill years were formative. Jones spent time in the archive, studying the house's leather goods and tailoring codes, then began layering in references from his own travels — Masai blankets, Japanese workwear, the technical fabrics used in mountaineering. The collections were coherent but not dogmatic. He collaborated with artists and craftspeople: the British painter and collagist Peter Doig, the Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, a collective of Kenyan beadworkers. The work sold. More importantly, it established a template: respect the house codes, but don't be imprisoned by them.

In 2011, Louis Vuitton came calling. Jones took over menswear and held the role for seven years, during which he turned the category into a billion-euro business. He brought in collaborators from outside fashion's usual circuit — Supreme, the artist KAWS, the fragment design founder Hiroshi Fujiwara — and staged shows that felt less like runway presentations than cultural events. The clothes themselves were meticulously constructed: shearling bombers with hand-stitched seams, tailored coats in double-faced wool, leather goods that referenced both the maison's monogram heritage and the utility of military surplus.

Then, in 2018, Dior. Jones replaced Kris Van Assche and immediately shifted the dial. His first collection featured a collaboration with Yoon Ahn of Ambush, whose jewellery designs brought a streetwear sensibility to Dior's grey-flannel classicism. Subsequent seasons layered in references to Christian Dior's love of gardens, his time in the Resistance, his friendships with artists like Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí. The tailoring remained impeccable — Jones had studied the house's archives and understood the geometry of the Bar jacket, the way a sleeve should sit without pulling — but the palette and proportions shifted toward something younger, less formal, more global.

The Pivot

Fendi was different. For one thing, it was womenswear. For another, it was a house whose identity had been shaped almost entirely by one man. Lagerfeld had arrived in 1965 as a consultant, became creative director in 1977, and stayed until his death in February 2019. His influence was total: the double-F logo, the Baguette bag, the fur innovations, the haute fourrure atelier, the collaborations with architects and artists. Silvia Venturini Fendi, who had been designing accessories and menswear since the eighties, stepped in after Lagerfeld's death and showed a single womenswear collection before Jones was named her successor.

Jones's first Fendi collection, shown in September 2021, was a study in restraint. He opened with tailoring — narrow coats in camel and grey, trousers cut high at the waist, blouses with exaggerated cuffs. The palette was muted: stone, tobacco, cream, black. There were nods to Lagerfeld — a reinterpreted Baguette, a few pieces in the house's signature shearling — but the overall mood was quieter, more architectural. Some critics called it safe. Others noted the difficulty of the task: how do you follow a thirty-six-year reign without either imitating the predecessor or discarding the house's DNA entirely?

Subsequent collections have grown bolder. Jones has leaned into Fendi's Roman heritage — not the gladiator clichés, but the city's layered history, its habit of building new structures atop ancient foundations. He has collaborated with artists: Marc Jacobs (who designed a capsule collection of Fendi-branded pieces), Doig (whose paintings inspired prints and colour palettes), the architect Cristiana Monfardini (who redesigned the Via Solari atelier). He has revisited the archive, pulling out forgotten techniques — a method of intarsia fur developed in the seventies, a way of bonding leather and silk without visible stitching — and applied them to contemporary silhouettes.

Signature

If Jones has a signature at Fendi, it is this: a kind of disciplined eclecticism. He does not impose a single aesthetic. Instead, he moves through the house's vocabulary — fur, leather, tailoring, the double-F logo — and recombines the elements in ways that feel both familiar and surprising. A shearling coat might be cut like a bomber. A Baguette might be rendered in transparent PVC. A couture gown might feature hand-embroidered beadwork inspired by Ndebele patterns, executed by the same Roman atelier that once worked for Lagerfeld.

The approach has precedent. Lagerfeld himself was a synthesiser, someone who moved between houses — Chloé, Fendi, Chanel — and adapted his vocabulary to each. Jones is doing something similar, though his references skew younger and more global. Where Lagerfeld cited eighteenth-century portraiture and Art Deco, Jones cites hip-hop, skateboarding, the visual language of Instagram. Whether this constitutes a signature or simply a reflection of the moment is a question the market will answer.

What Follows

Jones is fifty now, an age at which many designers begin to consolidate. He shows no sign of slowing. In addition to his Fendi role, he continues to design Dior Homme, a workload that would exhaust most creative directors. He travels constantly — to Tokyo for a collaboration launch, to Dakar for a research trip, to New York for a fitting. His studio is famously chaotic: fabric swatches pinned to walls, reference books stacked on every surface, samples in various stages of completion draped over chairs.

The question, as always, is sustainability. Not in the environmental sense — though Jones has spoken about Fendi's efforts to source responsibly and reduce waste — but in the human sense. Can one person maintain creative oversight of two major houses indefinitely? Lagerfeld did, but Lagerfeld was singular. Jones is talented, disciplined, and tireless, but he is not singular. He is part of a generation of designers who understand fashion as a collaborative enterprise, a conversation between past and present, between craft and commerce, between the atelier and the street.

Whether that conversation can continue at its current pace is an open question. For now, the work speaks: collections that honour Fendi's history without being imprisoned by it, clothes that feel both considered and contemporary, a creative vision that remains, on balance, more curious than certain.