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Jan
Kate Moss and daughter Lila grace catwalk
One has been a British fashion superstar for 30 years; the other is a British designer who is becoming fashion’s next global power player.
A rare catwalk turn by Kate Moss marked the moment that Kim Jones, lauded with industry awards but a little-known name in the wider world, took his place at fashion’s top table with his first womenswear collection, for Fendi haute couture. Moss was joined by her daughter Lila, 18, the first time the pair have walked a catwalk together. The actor Demi Moore opened the show in off-the-shoulder black satin; Naomi Campbell closed it in a silver cape with cathedral-length train. Such stellar casting, on a show filmed behind closed doors with no live audience, was an unmistakable flexing of strength.
Jones is a sneakerhead who also collects first editions of Virginia Woolf. He has five trophies from the British Fashion Awards, has been awarded an OBE, was mentored by Alexander McQueen, and counts the Beckhams as well as Moss in his circle of close friends. By aligning with Supreme during his tenure at Louis Vuitton and with Air Jordan at Dior, he pioneered a pivot to streetwear which transformed and energised the menswear world. His talents have long been recognised and rewarded by his bosses at LVMH – as is attested by his personal art collection, which includes a Francis Bacon and a Rene Magritte.
Jones has arrived to design women’s clothing at a house with a strong heritage of matriarchal leadership and female creativity. Silvia Fendi, the current menswear and accessories designer, is the fourth generation of Fendi women at the helm of the brand. Jones has enlisted Kate Moss as a consultant on accessories at Fendi, as well as a model, and the mother-and-daughter Moss casting was his way of honouring the Fendi tradition.
Jones said before the show: “Fendi is all about family … I am surrounded by strong, powerful women who I love and respect, and want to bring their energy into what I do.” He describes his own role at Fendi as “guest starring”.
Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando was Jones’s jumping-off point. The gender-blurring classic novel has become a go-to reference point in modern fashion, a book that is to the early 21st-century catwalk what the film Breakfast at Tiffany was to the late-20th. It has been the touchstone for collections by Christopher Bailey at Burberry, and Clare Waight Keller at Givenchy.
Jones grew up near Charleston, the Sussex home of the Bloomsbury group, and has amassed a collection of first editions of Woolf’s Orlando, which includes those owned by Vita Sackville-West and Vanessa Bell, two of the most important women in Woolf’s life.
“I admire the way they lived their lives, the freedom they created for themselves and the art that they left behind for the world,” Jones says of his connection to renegade Bloomsbury energy. This manifested itself in ways both straightforward – as with lines of Orlando inscribed into tiny mother-of-pearl minaudière handbags – and more oblique. The model Adwoa Aboah’s look was inspired by a sketch in the Fendi archives from Karl Lagerfeld’s tenure at the house, a nod to the time-travelling that is central to Orlando.
After walking the catwalk, each model struck a pose inside glass rooms which slotted together in the shape of Fendi’s double F logo. A chic take on the Covid-secure “bubble” – or perhaps on Woolf’s passion for a room of one’s own.
