Like most good tales, the fable of Fendi begins with romance. Based by husband and spouse Edoardo and Adele Fendi, the home’s first brick-and-mortar retailer was opened on Rome’s Through del Plebiscito in 1925. Over the 100 years since, it has remained – in a method or one other – a household enterprise, handed right down to generations of ladies who’ve every performed a component in propelling the small leather-based items boutique into a world luxurious empire.
Final season, Kim Jones’ last assortment for the home paid tribute to its exceptional maternal lineage, presenting a collection of ethereal appears that fused Fendi’s ochre-hued codes with the dropped-waist glamour of the Nineteen Twenties. Earlier than it was revealed, the voice of the 91-year-old Anna Fendi – daughter of Adele – spoke of her time operating Fendi along with her 4 sisters, Alda, Paola, Carla, and Franca. ‘Our mom at all times stated: You’re like a hand. There are 5 of you, the fingers. They’re totally different from one another; they’re complementary to one another.’
Inside Fendi’s centenary present at Milan Vogue Week
(Picture credit score: Pictures by Daniele Venturelli/WireImage through Getty Pictures)
This night in Milan, the reins had been again within the fingers of the Fendi household as soon as once more as Silvia Venturini Fendi – Anna Fendi’s daughter – offered the home’s A/W 2025 collections for women and men, designing the latter for the primary time since Jones’ appointment in 2020 (having been artistic director of the home’s menswear collections since 2000, she briefly designed Fendi womenswear after the loss of life of Karl Lagerfeld in 2019). It was becoming that the present additionally marked the centenary of the home, in addition to the opening of Fendi’s newly renovated headquarters on Through Solari, the place the present was held.
Starting theatrically with the dual sons of Silvia’s daughter, Delfina Delettrez Fendi pulling open an unlimited set of doorways – a recreation of these discovered on Through Borgognona in Rome, the place the Fendi sisters had their atelier – the gathering that adopted conjured a imaginative and prescient of Cinecittà glamour, ’a sensuality instilled with a Roman rigour,’ because the designer described. Materiality was a spotlight: a collection of ‘fur’ coats – a garment lengthy synonymous with the home – had been actually shearling, utilizing methods of intarsia, honeycomb and gheronato patchworks to recall the skins of sable, mink and fox. In the meantime smatterings of crystal and paillette adornment, delicate chantilly lace and pleated taffeta mirrored the gathering’s celebratory temper.
Going down within the huge central corridor of the renovated area – now double the scale of the area within the constructing beforehand used to point out the home’s runway collections – the forged was a roll-call of the home’s perennial muses, from Penelope Tree to Liya Kebede, Doutzen Kroes, Eva Herzigova and Karen Elson. In the meantime Sarah Jessica Parker – whose Intercourse and the Metropolis character Carrie Bradshaw propelled the Fendi Baguette bag, designed by Silvia Venturini Fendi in 1997, to worldwide fame – sat entrance row. She might barely conceal her delight.
(Picture credit score: Photograph by Daniele Venturelli/WireImage through Getty Pictures)
After Silvia Venturini Fendi took the runway to take a rapturous last bow (earlier than the runway was cleared to make method for a celebration full with pasta and champagne), the designer stated that regardless of the anniversary, she was hesitant of nostalgia. As an alternative, she stated she was trying in direction of the long run: one which, since Jones’ departure, is presently undefined. ‘I didn’t wish to spend an excessive amount of time dwelling on the bodily archives,’ she stated. ‘[This collection] is about my private reminiscences – actual or imagined – of what Fendi was, and what Fendi means in the present day.’ As for the Fendi of tomorrow, it stays to be seen – although after in the present day’s present, one wonders if there’s a case for maintaining it within the household.
‘This present is so vital to me,’ she advised Wallpaper*. ‘It’s a flashback and a quick ahead. It’s about 5 generations of Fendis, from my grandparents’ historic retailer and atelier to my grandsons opening the doorways to the present – a glance to the long run.’
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Supply: Wallpaper
