Fendi taps Dior designer Kim Jones to succeed Karl Lagerfeld

Jones will take still stay on as artistic director of Dior Homme, too

Fendi has announced that Kim Jones, centre, is taking over from the late Karl Lagerfeld as creative director of haute couture, ready-to-wear and fur collections. AP

Rome fashion house Fendi announced on 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 as artistic director of Dior Homme, another house in the luxury goods empire of LVMH chief Bernard Arnault.

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

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

Jones’s first Fendi collection will be ready-to-wear shown during the autumn-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.

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 she was looking forward to taking the Rome house “to the next level with him".