Kim Jones, artistic director of womenswear and couture at Fendi, has curated a new luxury fashion book to mark the centenary of Virginia Woolf's death this year, as well as the one-year anniversary of his debut at the Italian fashion house.
Titled The Fendi Set, the 230-page tome features many of the designer's closest friends, muses and collaborators - including Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Cara Delevingne, Bella Hadid, Christy Turlington and Demi Moore (we could go on) - in a tribute to the Bloomsbury Set; a group of English artists, philosophers and writers who lead the literary movement in the early 20th century. While Jones contributed to the text himself, he also enlisted additional words from author, stylist and creative director Jerry Stafford, as well as actress Tilda Swinton, who wrote the preface, and Bloomsbury scholar Dr. Mark Hussey, who penned the introduction.
Naomi Campbell
NIKOLAI VON BISMARCK
Christy Turlington
The book's photography comes courtesy of documentary and portrait photographer, Nikolai von Bismarck, who spent nearly a year capturing the imagery, using cameras and techniques from the Bloomsbury Set’s time period to recreate ethereal atmospheric effects.
The book is a celebration of the history and heritage of both Fendi and the Bloomsbury Group, and takes particular inspiration from Woolf and her work Orlando - a successful novel inspired by her friend and lover, the poet and novelist Vita Sackville West - which explores themes of sexuality and gender fluidity. The book also inspired Jones' debut couture collection for Fendi, pieces from which can be seen throughout the pages of The Fendi Set.
"When I first started at Fendi and I was looking at what I was going to do the first collection on, I thought there was a really nice story between the strong women - the Fendis - and then celebrating the Bloomsbury Group," explains Jones. "Nikolai portrays romance and there's a real timelessness to his work, which is what a lot of Virginia Woolf's work is about."
Cara Delevingne
Lila Grace Moss
"The Fendi Set was an idea crafted by Kim and I," adds von Bismarck. "We thought, this is a wonderful, rich topic, which we could really turn into a book... The idea was to link the Bloomsbury Set to Rome and so we thought the best way to do this was by photographing all of these places that the Bloomsbury Set lived.... The links with Italy were then brought in through the girls in the clothes."
Go behind the scenes on the making of the book in our exclusive video above.
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