Muristek
The Bloomsbury Set may be better associated with the rolling Downs of the East Sussex countryside than the cobbled streets of Rome, yet as a new book by the Italian fashion house Fendi explores, the trailblazing creatives had intrinsic links with its Eternal City hometown
The brainchild of Fendi’s womenswear artistic director Kim Jones and Vogue photographer Nikolai von Bismarck, The Fendi Set is an exploration of the locations, landscapes and landmarks synonymous with the set, casting the starry model lineup from Jones’s first Fendi couture show in Paris – entitled From Bloomsbury to Borghese and including Kate and Lila Moss, Demi Moore, and Christy Turlington – as the collective’s 21st-century counterparts.
Much like the work of their muses, the year-long project required a multi-disciplinary and fastidious approach. “There were all these incredible links,” enthuses von Bismarck who, along with a tight team that included Darren Clark at the Charleston Trust (the modernist Sussex HQ of the group), spent the best part of 2021 deep diving, uncovering letters in the New York Library to Virginia Woolf from her sister Vanessa Bell when the latter was staying at Rome’s Hotel de Russie; discovering Duncan Grant had a studio in Via Margutta; and finding that Woolf’s marbling for her books was the same as that at the Villa Borghese.
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