Fendi taps Dior designer Kim Jones to succeed Karl Lagerfeld

Sept. 9, 2020 3:35 AM PT

ROME — Rome fashion house Fendi announced Wednesday 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 womenswear design chief since 1977.

Jones’ first Fendi collection will be a ready-to-wear line shown during the fall and winter 2021-22 fashion week in February.

Jones’ new position is 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 and summer 2021 collection will be shown in Milan later this month.

Arnault, chief executive of Fendi parent company LVMH, praised Jones for having proved 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 she was looking forward to taking the Rome house “to the next level with him.”