Kim Jones' Latest Collection for Fendi Is Inspired by Delfina Delettrez

Plus, there’s a new “It” bag in town.

Models at Fendi‘s Fall 2023 show emerged onto a runway lit up by something like a kaleidoscope. Pleated leather tennis skirts were styled over straight leg pants. Airy capes were tacked onto only one shoulder of a garment. Sequins lined the inside of one jacket, while the double-F monogram covered the outer shell of another. The result is something chic but deconstructed, alluring but grungy.

The muse for all this? It’s also Fendi.

Kim Jones’ latest collection for the Italian fashion house is inspired by Delfina Delettrez Fendi, the jewelry designer and fourth generation heir of the Fendi family. (She’s Silvia Venturini’s daughter.) He’s cited her and other women in the blood line before as influences, as they’re known to pull from the archives and find new ways to wear the brand’s clothes.

In the show notes, Jones wrote: “It all started with Delfina. There’s a chicness but a perversity to the way she twists Fendi, which is what I love.”

Beyond specific references to outfits that Delettrez Fendi has actually worn (“the first day that Delfina walked into work, she was wearing blue and brown, and I thought she looked so great,” Jones said, in the notes), Fall 2023 also pulls graphic motifs from collections and even creative directors’ past, like pieces that update Karl Lagerfeld-era sketches for today’s wearer.

The 52-look collection has workwear — slacks, collared shirts, gray jackets, ash crewnecks, cream-colored dresses — as well as “flashes of fetishism,” per the show notes, as seen in the lace details, peek-a-boo lingerie and thigh-high lace-up latex boots. Masculine tailoring is molded to feminine shapes. Utilitarian pieces presented alongside dresses fit for a nightclub. It’s a collection of dualities in opposition. Plus, “there’s a little nod to punk and my admiration for DIY,” according to Jones.

With Fendi’s track record for hit accessories, you always have to look at what the models are carrying on the runway, too. And for those who can’t get enough of the Baguette, Fendi presents new handbag by Venturini for Fall 2023: the Multi, which “pays homage to that multipurpose sensibility so innate to the house, through a shape which has been engineered to transform between two distinct silhouettes,” per a press release.

Scroll down to see every look from the Fendi Fall 2023 runway.