The fitting room on the third floor of Palazzo Fendi smells faintly of steam and bergamot
The fitting room on the third floor of Palazzo Fendi smells faintly of steam and bergamot. Kim Jones stands beside a dressmaker's form draped in what appears to be a coat, though the proportions suggest otherwise — the sleeves fall past where hands would rest, the hem pools. He adjusts a single pin at the shoulder seam, steps back, considers. The garment is not a coat. It is, he explains to the two assistants flanking him, a question about where outerwear ends and architecture begins. This is January 2024. Jones has been artistic director of womenswear and couture at Fendi since September 2020, and the vocabulary he works in — proportion as provocation, volume as grammar — has become the house's second language.
Jones arrived at Fendi with a reputation already formed. He had spent seven years at Louis Vuitton menswear, where he turned the runway into a kind of salon: collaborations with Supreme, with Kim Kardashian's shapewear line, with anime franchises. Before that, a decade building his own label in London, where he became known for reworking military surplus and Edwardian tailoring into something both precise and unruly. The appointment surprised no one in the trade and baffled a few outside it. Fendi, after all, had been helmed by Karl Lagerfeld for 54 years — a tenure so long it had calcified into myth. When Lagerfeld died in February 2019, the question was not whether Fendi could continue, but whether it should.
Silvia Venturini Fendi, who has overseen accessories and menswear since 1994, remained. The decision to split Lagerfeld's role rather than replace it outright was, one suspects, as much structural as symbolic. Venturini Fendi carries institutional memory; Jones carries momentum. What he does not carry is sentimentality. In his first collection for the house, shown in September 2021 after a pandemic delay, he opened with a series of coats in shearling and nappa leather, cut with dropped shoulders and extended through the torso in a way that made the models look both armoured and unburdened. The silhouette was his, but the materials — Fendi's double-F logo worked into the shearling, the hand of the leather — were unmistakably the house's. It was a negotiation, not a manifesto.
Formation
Jones grew up in London and Botswana, the son of a hydrogeologist. He has spoken in interviews, including a 2015 profile in System, about spending childhood summers in southern Africa, where his father worked on water projects in remote villages. The aesthetic vocabulary he absorbed there — textiles as record-keeping, ornament as information — runs through his work in ways both literal and oblique. He studied at Central Saint Martins under the late Louise Wilson, a tutor known for her severity and for producing a disproportionate number of designers who went on to lead European houses. His graduate collection in 2002 featured parkas and anoraks reworked from vintage military stock, each piece overdyed and reconstructed with an attention to seam placement that suggested tailoring training he had not, strictly speaking, received.
His own label, launched in 2003, operated on a small scale for nearly a decade. He showed in London, sold through a handful of specialty retailers, and built a reputation among buyers for delivering exactly what he said he would, on time and within budget. This is rarer than it sounds. When Vuitton approached him in 2011 to take over menswear, the move was seen as lateral at best — Vuitton's men's line was profitable but not particularly visible, and Jones was a niche name outside the UK. What followed was a seven-year run that redefined what a heritage house could absorb without diluting. The Supreme collaboration in 2017, which saw the monogram reworked in red and white, became a case study in how far luxury could bend toward streetwear without breaking. It also made Vuitton menswear one of the most commercially successful lines in LVMH's portfolio.
The Fendi Proposition
Fendi's history is, in large part, a history of fur. The house was founded in Rome in 1925 as a leather and fur workshop, and by the time Lagerfeld joined in 1965, it had become synonymous with a particular kind of technical virtuosity — fur treated like fabric, sheared and dyed and intarsia-ed into patterns that had more in common with textile design than with pelts. Lagerfeld's genius, if one can use the word without embarrassment, was to make that virtuosity feel contemporary in every decade he worked. The Baguette bag, designed by Silvia Venturini Fendi in 1997, became the house's second signature, less about craft than about proportion and status signalling.
Jones inherited both legacies and has, by most accounts, treated them as constraints to work within rather than around. His first couture collection for Fendi, shown in January 2021, featured gowns constructed from strips of shearling and leather, layered and fringed in a way that recalled both Lagerfeld's fur experiments and Jones's own interest in texture as structure. The collection was well-received in the press, though the commercial impact of couture is always indirect — it is a loss leader, a statement of capability. What matters more, in practical terms, is whether the ready-to-wear and accessories hold. So far, they do. Fendi's revenue has grown steadily under Jones's tenure, driven in part by the Peekaboo and Baguette lines, both of which he has reworked in materials and silhouettes that feel adjacent to, rather than derivative of, their original forms.
Signature and Syntax
If Jones has a signature at Fendi, it is restraint applied to excess. The Fall 2023 collection, shown in Milan, opened with a series of outerwear pieces — coats and capes in shearling, leather, and wool — cut with exaggerated shoulders and cinched waists, a silhouette that nodded to postwar Dior but rendered in materials and proportions that felt immediate. The colour palette was narrow: camel, black, ivory, rust. The show notes referenced Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, though the connection was more atmospheric than literal. What registered, in the end, was a kind of controlled abundance — clothes that looked expensive because they were, but also because the construction was legible. You could see where the seams fell, how the leather was pieced, why the hem sat where it did.
This is not, it should be said, a universally admired approach. Some critics have noted that Jones's Fendi feels more like an expansion of his own aesthetic than a reinvention of the house's. Business of Fashion ran a piece in late 2022 questioning whether his work was distinct enough from his Vuitton tenure to justify the appointment. The concern is not unfounded. Jones's vocabulary — oversized outerwear, collaborations with artists and estates, a magpie approach to reference — is consistent across both houses. Whether that consistency is a strength or a limitation depends, perhaps, on whether one believes a designer should serve the house or vice versa.
What Follows
Jones is 51 now, which in fashion terms is neither young nor old. He has said in interviews, including a 2023 conversation in Vogue, that he does not see himself staying at Fendi for 54 years, though he also does not plan to leave soon. The question of succession, at houses like this, is always hovering. Fendi is part of LVMH, which means decisions about creative leadership are made with an eye toward market performance and brand positioning as much as aesthetic vision. Jones delivers on both counts, and so he stays. Whether the work he is doing now will define Fendi's next chapter or simply occupy it is a question that will not be answerable for another decade, at minimum.
For now, the fitting room on the third floor continues. The coat that is not a coat has been pinned and re-pinned, and Jones has moved on to a dress in leather so fine it moves like jersey. He adjusts the neckline, frowns, adjusts it again. The dress will appear in the Spring 2025 collection, or it will not. Either way, the work proceeds — incremental, specific, and for the moment, his.
