Decades in fashion tend to come into focus around the midway point, and it’s starting to look like the 2020s will in some ways resemble the 1920s, considered the birth era of modernity in design, decoration and dress.
Next summer the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris is plotting a retrospective of Paul Poiret, who loosened the corset’s grip on fashion at the turn of the century, and also a “Grand Ball” to celebrate the centenary of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris.
As he prepared his latest collection for Fendi alongside preparations for the Roman house’s centenary, Kim Jones was thinking along similar, straight and loose lines. He name-checked that decorative arts exhibition and opened his show with a trio of gorgeous, gauzy flapper dresses sporting delicate Art Deco embroideries and fringe.
They continued a thread seen in London at Erdem, where designer Erdem Moralıoğlu tuned into English writer Radclyffe Hall and the 1920s craze for delicate, low-slung dresses.
The decade also produced a bounty of great books and new thinking, including Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” Jones said.
But his muse was Adele Fendi, founding figure of a house long led by women, and a champion of precise, modern taste. He conscripted composer Max Richter to mix his stirring music with quotes from Anna and Silvia Venturini Fendi talking about their mother and grandmother, respectively.
The show cast a wistful, melancholy mood, fed by Richter’s droning piano, the gentle color palette, the wispy fabrics and delicate embroideries. Wallpaper prints, apron-like overskirts and little jam-jar bag charms added a homespun touch.
Backstage in front of the photo board, Jones was mum about Fendi’s plans for the centenary, though consider the spring collection a primer of this family story.
“I looked at all the different family members of a few Fendi generations, and have done different versions of each one,” he said, pointing to looks created with Adele, Anna, Silvia Venturini Fendi and Delfina Delletrez Fendi, Jones’ forever muse in her pencil skirts, oversized tops and medium heels.
While these were relatively quiet clothes, often simple in cut and restrained in embellishment, they impressed with their delicacy, finesse, and a luxury feeling, perhaps exemplified by a simple T-shirt dress in sueded crocodile that rippled like velvet as the models strolled the perimeter of the vast, square show set at Superstudio Maxi Milano.
They entered a modernist structure, reminiscent of USM furniture, which cracked open at the end to show the models gathered, family style.