“It was just too intense,” says designer Kim Jones, as he plonks down his two Hermès bags (one big Birkin with mini Kelly attached) on a chair and cracks open a can of full fat Coke in the plush boardroom of Sotheby’s auction house.
Ten days before we speak, news Jones was stepping down from his much-envied position as artistic director of Fendi, where he succeeded Karl Lagerfeld in 2020, had broken. Today he remains artistic director of Dior Men’s, a role he has had since 2018, and runs the Kim Jones Studio in London for personal projects.
In conquering Paris and Rome, there can be no doubt the Central Saint Martins graduate, 51, is one of our city’s greatest modern fashion exports. An audience with him over the past decade — he was the men’s artistic director at Louis Vuitton between 2011 and 2018 beforehand — has been rare.
“My time has been very, very limited for the past four years, so I’m happy to have a bit more time to get on with doing things I really love as well,” he says. Jones is dressed down in worn denim jeans, a navy pullover and fashion hiking boots, and speaks at the speed of someone who has organised their days in 15-minute increments for a long time.
“I love Sylvia and Delfina Fendi, they’re like family to me,” he follows quickly. “But you have to consider yourself number one. Time is more valuable than money. If you can use your time usefully, that’s a good thing,” he says. “Now I can do lots of nice things, so it was a good choice.” He pauses. “But I’m not allowed to talk about that — that’s off the record.”
So begins our conversation about the first project Jones has embarked on since he stopped juggling two of the most powerful jobs in fashion — his segue into the art world. Earlier this year he was appointed vice president of Charleston House, the Bloomsbury Group hangout, home and studio of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, in East Sussex. The “bohemian” haven, frequented by Bloomsbury members counting Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot, is a time capsule where every corner holds discovery.
Jones first visited on a school trip aged 14, and is now one of the world’s leading collectors of objects from the period, which spanned roughly 1907 to 1930. “I really just loved their modernist approach to life back in the days when it was frowned upon. They really did shift English perception out of Victoriana,” he says.
Last weekend, he opened the doors to his exhibition here at Sotheby’s, Radical Modernity: From Bloomsbury to Charleston. It is part sale, part loan exhibition he has curated, complete with contributions from his own Notting Hill home and other private collectors — a highlight is Grant’s 1915 nude of writer David Garnett, a frequenter of the house and one of his lovers.
Relics from the Bloomsbury Group are but one of Jones’s multiple collections. “I’m a completist and get quite compulsive about collecting certain things,” he explains. “I collect things from people that change the way people think.” Others include “a big Beat collection, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, because they really shifted the way America thought; a big punk collection and Leigh Bowery. Then painters, too: a bit of Bacon, bit of Freud, bit of Matisse and Peter Doig.”
One of his greatest extravagances might be his penchant for reading first edition books, however. “I like to read first editions because things get edited,” he says. “It’s also nice to have ones that have been touched by an author’s hand. It’s the closest you can get to an author.” He is attempting to build up a whole Virginia Woolf library of firsts to donate to Charleston. “It’s quite nerdy of me, but I think we are all quite nerdy in a way. It’s nerds who are the ones that win in the end.”
Jones was destined to lean towards the best things in life. His father was a hydrogeologist (a scientist studying the flow of water underground) “so we would go abroad and just see so much really endangered wildlife. We went to Ecuador when I was three months old, and it was always back and forth to England from then,” he says. Importantly, though, “My father had expensive taste. So did my uncle. They always had the finest things, collecting carpets and African and Asian art. I was surrounded by these people that really had a taste for beautiful objects, so it rubs off on you.”
Despite a life spent travelling, London has always pulled him back. “I lived in Paris for nearly eight or nine years, and then I came home. I like the energy of London, the youth of London and the freedom of London.”
With lesser work commitments, he is set on helping the British fashion industry — which, thanks to Brexit, he describes as in a “dire” state — flourish again. “It’s incredibly sad because it’s such a huge business, and the creativity in London is exceptional. A few of us have been incredibly lucky to get up there before this all happened, but I wouldn’t be able to go to college now,” he says. “That’s a real shame, because money doesn’t mean you’re good at something. It’s quite often the people that have to work really hard that do the best work.”
He slows down, finally, before saying pensively: “I think there’s a lot to do in the UK — it’s just getting the time to do it. Hopefully that will shift.” Whether he will step down from his other conglomerate gig to focus solely on personal passions remains to be seen. I must say, though, it would not surprise me.
