Home and Away

When he’s not refashioning the house of Fendi, Kim Jones takes refuge in an 18th-century Sussex home out of an Em Forster novel.

- HAMISH BOWLES

At the impressionable age of 14, Kim Jones, Fendi's artistic director of women's collections, experienced a double epiphany when he was turned on both to fashion and to the multifaceted wonders of the Bloomsbury Group, the loose collective of forward-thinking creatives and intellectuals that shaped the look of British art and thought in the early 20th century. Jones's passion for the latter began on a high-school trip to the Charleston farmhouse in Sussex, the hub of the group known for their unbridled creativity and triangular relationships. As the schoolboy toured the house, layered with pattern and paint and charm, and drew in the gardens, famed for their exuberant plantings and spirited layerings of colour, he thrilled to the idea of “all these people living together and living quite free lives”, as he puts it now. “Anyone who's forward-thinking and changes the way society lives is interesting to me. That's something that I've always stood for in my life: I want to live how I live, and it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.”