OUR MAN AT FENDI

As its newly appointed artistic director of womenswear, Kim Jones is bringing a deeply personal British sensibility to Fendi. He talks to Olivia Singer about drawing inspiration from the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, while Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott photograph Kate Moss wearing his debut couture collection at Charleston, the artistic set’s Sussex home

- Kim Jones

Instead of sitting amid the high-vaulted, light-drenched glamour of the Fendi atelier to talk with Kim Jones about his first collection for the Roman house, we go for a country walk in Sussex on an awfully grey day, blustery and bleak with thick mist rendering it almost dark in the afternoon. We’re a long way from the Italian capital, where scores of seamstresses are in the process of weaving lattices of pearls and ornately embroidering couture gowns for his upcoming debut, but, nonetheless, it soon makes a lovely sort of sense. Jones recently bought a holiday home here, in the quiet village of Rodmell, a stone’s throw from the house where he spent much of his upbringing, and a few doors down from Virginia Woolf’s cottage. “As a teenager, I spent a lot of time cycling around all these villages,” he smiles, sidestepping a growling tractor, “This first collection feels almost autobiographical.”