If stealth wealth and craft-core have united fashion’s latest style tribes through a quiet-luxury lens, then Fendi’s latest moniker shows it’s a trend that has legs. Step forward the “corporate artisan”, star of the Italian fashion house’s SS24 show on Thursday night and proposed pin-up for next season.
Part technical-whizz, part traditional tool-master, the handle speaks to the modern-day creative, said Artistic Director Silvia Venturini Fendi in a pre-show preview with CNN. Fendi also wanted to celebrate the relationship between “man and the machine” and their mutually complementary output.
“I like to portray the artisans of the future,” she shared before the show. “(Over history), machines have been helping man (to complete) so many pieces of work that were hard and debilitating and have been elevating the standards of work from the human being, but (I like) the artistic possibilities that (that) a human gives you.”
In turn, the collection delivered both traditional and technical displays of craftsmanship, all with the house’s trademark playful wink.
Precision-cut duster coats had loopholes for measuring tapes and name badges; industrial leather aprons, that were worn as dresses and skirts, came complete with fully stocked tool belts; a brown leather tote resembled cardboard coffee-cup holder; and silk shirt and suits had prints that resembled the pattern-cutter’s chalk.
For the accessories, Venturini Fendi collaborated with the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma - who she regards to be “the best to combine nature and technology” - to reinvent signature Fendi bags including the Peekaboo in traditional Japanese washi paper. Shoes, meanwhile, came in the form of the Fendi Lab Clog (think a leather croc-cum-clog with a bio-based rubber sole and next season’s main rival to the JW Anderson “crog” of AW23).
The fashion brand brought guests to its six-month-old Fendi Factory in Capannuccia just outside Florence on Thursday evening to emphasise its messaging. The 30,000 square-metre plot is LEED-Certified (a global recognition of buildings with high sustainability credentials) and houses production, testing laboratories, and management offices within its floor-to-ceiling glass walls. The factory floor was transformed into a catwalk as employees - who had attended their own show prior - continued to work on at stations in the background.
The set, said Venturini Fendi, was masterminded so to be transparent about the teamwork involved in creating a fashion collection. “It’s not just a designer but (lots of) fantastic people who, when the collection approaches, work night and day, even over the weekend to accomplish what we need”.
She also wanted to use the occasion as an opportunity to highlight the importance of understanding the provenance of her family brand’s products.
“It’s important for younger generations to understand why a product is a luxury product,” she said. “There are values (with) something that has to last for a lifetime and we have to give them the means to understand this. It’s not something that you can detect from a price. There are people who don’t understand if a bag is plastic or leather – that was probably a mistake we all (made) in fashion (over the years); to portray one aspect but not the complete aspect.”
As the third-generation designer to take the creative reins since her grandmother, Adele, established the brand in Rome in 1925, 62-year-old Venturini Fendi has a more-comprehensive view than most about the progression of the fashion industry. In a jovial nostalgic mood backstage, the designer recalled walking for Fendi’s former creative director, the late Karl Lagerfeld, in a show when she was six-years-old and a moment from her childhood, when her nanny took her and her sisters to the grocers to buy fruit.
“When I was a little, my mother used to always dress us in black and one day a woman said, “Oh, the poor girls are they orphans? My nanny said, “no, they are in fashion!”