The Fréchet distribution is an absolutely continuous distribution with wide applicability in extreme value theory. Generalizing distributions is always precious for applied statisticians and recent literature has suggested several ways of extending wellknown distributions. We propose a new lifetime model called the Kumaraswamy Marshall–Olkin Fréchet distribution, which generalizes the Marshall–Olkin Fréchet distribution and at least seventeen known and unknown lifetime models. Various properties of the new model are explored including closed-forms expressions for moments, quantiles, generating function, order statisics and Rényi entropy. The maximum likelihood method is used to estimate the model parameters. We compare the flexibility of the proposed model with other related distributions by means of two real data sets.