Kim Jones wants to rule the fashion world

KIM Jones, the British designer, is many things. He is among the most celebrated menswear talents of his generation. He is a five-time winner of various British fashion awards, for menswear designer of the year, Trailblazer and Creativity, and he has received the Order of the British Empire. He is the former head of his own label, as well as Dunhill and Louis Vuitton menswear, and is the current head of Dior menswear. (He is the guy who got Vuitton to collaborate with Supreme, and Dior with Air Jordan.) He is BFF with Kate Moss. He is a collector of rare books (about 20,000), rare vintage clubbing wear (early pieces from Vivienne Westwood and Leigh Bowery) and rare vinyl (around 6,000 records). He is a peripatetic child of Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. He is all that.

What he has not been, however, is a womenswear designer. He did not study womenswear at Central Saint Martins and, at 41, has never made a full women's collection.

Yet last September, the executives at LVMH named Mr Jones the artistic director of womenswear for Fendi, the position held for 54 years by Karl Lagerfeld, the most prolific, provocative and omnivorously cultured designer of the 20th and early 21st century, one of the few who transcended fashion to become practically a piece of pop art unto himself.

What were they thinking? This week, as Mr Jones introduces his debut couture show for Fendi, everyone will find out.

"It's quite a challenge," said Antoine Arnault, the LVMH group head of communications and chief executive of Berluti, another LVMH men's brand, who has known Mr Jones since they worked together at Vuitton. But, he said, Mr Jones is "one of our superstars". Then he used words like "mysterious" and "unexplained drive" before finally settling on a soccer metaphor.

"When you have a top footballer on your team," Mr Arnault said, "you want to let him play to his full potential." Mr Jones is not the first designer to make the jump from menswear to womenswear - Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, Raf Simons and Hedi Slimane did it before him - but given that Fendi surpassed a billion euros ( about S$1.6 billion) in revenue in 2017 to become one of the more important brands in the LVMH stable, a lot is riding on his success. In addition, Mr Jones remains the artistic director of Dior menswear, which means he is not only stepping into Mr Lagerfeld's shoes at Fendi, but also, like Lagerfeld, he will be the only designer at the top of two global luxury heritage brands, responsible for at least 12 collections a year, a balancing act that has long been seen as a handicap to creativity.

Still, said Marios Schwab, who designed a women's collection in 2003 for Mr Jones's namesake label, he has long been "majorly ambitious". He did, after all, close his own label with very little tsuris after he landed the bigger jobs, swapping independence for the corporate superstructure of power, budgets and reach. As he told British Vogue when he joined Vuitton: "Why would I want to do my own label when I can do fantastic things here and put my spin on things?"

Gender non-specific

Then he added, "You can't be that naïve about the world, you have to get on with stuff."

Besides, said Jefferson Hack, a founder of Dazed Media, who has known and chronicled Mr Jones since college: "Kim's vision has always been very gender non-specific. Though he has a strong point of view on the new masculinity, he has also been good at making pieces from his collections appeal to female desire."

Not that Mr Jones himself seems particularly worried. Like Lagerfeld, he has both a healthy sense of his own talent and an equally healthy lack of neuroses about the size of his job.

"I think I've achieved quite a few good things in my career, and this is the next step," he said, speaking from the study of his house in West London a few weeks before the Fendi show, which will not exactly be a humble, finding-his-feet debut. Rather, it will be a go-big-or-go-splat bid with a cast that is to include (still to be confirmed) Demi Moore, Kate and Lila Moss, Bella Hadid, Adwoa Aboah, and Christy and James Turlington posed in different vignettes amid a maze of glass boxes in the Palais Brongniart, the former French stock exchange.

As he talked, Mr Jones was wearing a black Loro Piana vicuña knit he said had been a Christmas present. (The brand is also owned by LVMH.) Over Christmas, his normally brown hair had been dyed platinum blond, and he had lost about 33 pounds during lockdown, thanks to having an indoor pool and being home enough to actually have a routine.

He was sitting in front of a wall of shelves that housed his collection of rare books, including an uncorrected proof of To Kill a Mockingbird, a first edition of Breakfast at Tiffany's, original lyrics by the Velvet Underground and nine versions of Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Among them was one that Woolf had inscribed to Vita Sackville-West, her lover; one owned by Noël Coward; and another owned by John Maynard Keynes. The positioning was not a coincidence.

Mr Jones's couture show was inspired by Orlando and the whole Bloomsbury set, who may have hung out in the English countryside but also had a love affair with Rome (which is, of course, where Fendi was founded).

He is fully aware that this may seem a hackneyed choice for a debut, given that Bloomsbury is one of the most overused references in fashion, having inspired such designers as John Galliano, Christopher Bailey and Rei Kawakubo, but in stationing himself in front of his books, he was making an implicit argument about his right to the subject. As well as his understanding of his new job. "Couture," Mr Jones said, "is very personal." It is, after all, about garments made to order, for a single person. Orlando was demonstrably very personal to him. Hence couture equals Orlando.

Though his appointment at Fendi is relatively new - he has officially been there only just over 14 weeks - the move was first mooted a couple of years ago when he started to get antsy at Vuitton, and in menswear.

Great expectations

Men's clothing may be a growing sector, but womenswear remains the glamour side of the business: The shows are bigger, as are the collections, celebrities and budgets.

Rumours had reached a fever pitch that Mr Jones was going to join Donatella Versace at Versace, to become her heir. Instead, he played his chess pieces like a grandmaster and ended up moving to Dior, with the suggestion, it was rumoured, of more to come.

Indeed, it was during those earlier negotiations, Mr Jones said, that Silvia Venturini Fendi (the Fendi family member still involved in the business, and the head of men's and accessories) broached the idea of him coming to Fendi to work on the women's line.

As far as Mr Jones is concerned, it is navigating the multitude of choices in womenswear that is the biggest learning curve. For a reality check he has a group of women around him, including Kate Moss, who consulted on accessories; the stylist Melanie Ward; the art director Ronnie Cooke Newhouse; and, most of all, Ms Fendi and her daughter, Delfina.

Though Mr Jones made his name at Vuitton and Dior in part by his ability to meld the tropes of street wear and the runway and his embrace of collaborations, those who expect him to reprise those skills, but in womenswear, will be disappointed. There are no haute sneakers or hoodies in the couture, no work from guest artists. Rather, there are Bernini marble prints and elaborate brocade, pearl-speckled chiffon and rose-festooned silks.

The collection is a consciously eclectic mélange of androgyny and reference, including a nod to Lagerfeld, with a half-suit, half-evening-gown look inspired by a sketch of his from 1993. Also, there are a lot of capes.

You can understand why Mr Jones might have mantles on the mind. And they do look good on everyone. NYTIMES