Kim Jones to succeed Karl Lagerfeld at Fendi's helm

Rome fashion house Fendi has announced that Kim Jones is succeeding the late Karl Lagerfeld as creative director of haute couture, ready-to-wear and fur collections for women.

Jones will take on the Fendi duties while staying on as artistic director of Dior Homme, another house in the Paris-based luxury goods empire of LVMH chief Bernard Arnault.

He joins the third-generation Silvia Venturini Fendi, who will continue in charge of creating Fendi accessories and menswear collections.

The British-born Jones fills the void left by the 2019 death of Lagerfeld, who had joined Fendi in 1965 and had been its womens wear design chief since 1977.

Jones’ first Fendi collection will be ready-to-wear shown during the fall-winter 2021-2022 fashion week in February. It’s the second major fashion partnership announced in recent months, after news that Raf Simons would join Miuccia Prada as co-creative director of Prada. Their first joint women’s spring-summer 2021 collection will be shown in Milan later this month.

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Arnault, chief executive of Fendi parent company LVMH, praised Jones for having proven he could “adapt to the codes and heritage of the LVMH houses while revisiting them with great modernity and audacity.”

Jones, who joined Louis Vuitton in 2011 and moved to Dior Homme seven years later, said working at Fendi and Dior together was a “huge privilege.”

Fendi said it was looking forward to taking the Rome house “to the next level with him.”

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