Reflecting on transcendent romance and timeless creativity, Kim Jones’ debut for the Fendi Spring 2021 Haute Couture collection draws on the British sensibility of the Bloomsbury Group and the eternal language of Italian sculpture and Fendi’s everlasting house codes.

Raised between the continent of Africa, London and Sussex, Kim Jones’ personal biography is inexorably interlinked – both by proximity and fascination – with the spirit of the Bloomsbury Group. From an upbringing spent a short distance from Virginia Woolf’s home, Monk’s House, the spirit of Bloomsbury remained ever-present throughout Jones’ childhood, and inspired his most formative years.

Those early experiences have since evolved into a fixation with the creative set, whose aesthetics and philosophies are reflected within his debut collection for Fendi Couture. Alongside the show stands an exhibition of their books and ephemera, curated by Sammy Jay of Peter Harrington Rare Books.

The relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West sits at the heart of the collection – both of books, and Fendi Couture. After falling in love with one another in 1922, only years before Fendi itself was founded, it was Sackville-West who went on to inspire Woolf’s Orlando: the time-travelling, binary-blurring masterpiece which her son later referred to as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which [Virginia] explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her.”

Go behind-the-scenes at the Fendi Spring 2021 Haute Couture​ show, the models enact moments and moods from Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando”, central motif of Kim Jones’ debut collection.