LEADING LADY
With Silvia Venturini Fendi at its helm, the heritage Fendi brand keeps its eye fixed on the future.
With Silvia Venturini Fendi at its helm, the heritage Fendi brand keeps its eye fixed on the future.
Ihave to talk to Silvia,” bellows the European television presenter backstage at the Fendi show in Milan. She’s wielding a microphone with the logo of her show, and paws towards the unmarked door, trying to push her way past the public relations executives who mill outside on guard. They’re watching the clock to make sure Silvia Venturini Fendi – inside, behind the door – remains on schedule. After fashion shows there is always a hubbub of activity. Charlotte Stockdale, the stylist and consultant, stays outside, showing her industry friends her new heels, the hem of a skirt and receiving congratulations on the show. Kendall Jenner and Karl Lagerfeld have already slipped away. Lagerfeld is in charge of designing the ready-to-wear line and works closely with Venturini Fendi, who is creative director for accessories, menswear and childrenswear. Press are poring over Jenner’s opening look inspired by a manga warrior princess and featuring prerequisite fur tufts on the shoulders. They are taking smartphone snaps as if by osmosis a bit of her social media star power will leach on to them. (I’m one of them. I can’t help it; deliberating over whether to post on Vogue’s Instagram or Snapchat. I chose Snapchat.)
Venturini Fendi has escaped inside, where it’s a bastion of quiet. The all-white room, burning scented candles and flowers represent an endeavour to create a space away from the melee. The scene is not out of the ordinary for your run-of-the-mill interview with a major designer. What is unusual is to be schooled by a doyenne designer on the science of gravitational waves – the inspiration behind the collection.
Just before the fashion press, guests had taken in the collection, which had waves spilling out over clothing and accessories, knitted 60s stripes and high-waisted shorts – all the better to wear with over-the-knee suede boots and embellished Peekaboo handbags, all of which we will see in Australia, with two stores having opened in David Jones in Sydney and Melbourne.
Einstein had predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916 on the basis of his theory of general relativity. Physical proof of them only emerged in September last year, when Lagerfeld and Venturini Fendi started designing this collection. “We had been reading about it, all of us, and Karl was really impressed by that because the discovery brings a new vision to the universe,” says Venturini Fendi matterof-factly. “Gravitational waves as the reaction of two black holes colliding millions of years ago brings all the memories in the past, but in a very ethereal, cosmic way.”
That’s all very Fendi, as it turns out. The standard luxury house trades on its heritage and history, but Venturini Fendi is having none of that. Though if she wanted to, she could: her grandparents, Edoardo and Adele, launched Fendi in 1925 as a fur workshop and leathergoods store with the addition of luggage in 1938 – accoutrements for the wealthy. “We have our history and our DNA, but Fendi has always been very much projected into the future,” says Venturini Fendi. “We experiment and are interested in creating something that doesn’t exist already from traditional techniques and materials like fur, which is the oldest material, the first garment of the human being.” She chats happily about working with Lagerfeld. “You know, working with Karl it’s evident that
“THERE IS A WAY OF MAKING IT INTERESTING AND BEAUTIFUL TO YOU”
Fendi has been always looking forward, not so much back, because he is someone who is interested mostly in what doesn’t exist rather than what does.” The past then, is a foreign country after all, and one they leave be. “You don’t find so many references of the past. We like to give new energy and bring new energy.” Fendi wants to be part of the future.
The past though is rich with stories. After being founded by Venturini Fendi’s grandparents, the business was passed on to their five Italian daughters: Paola, Franca, Carla, Alda and Silvia’s mother, Anna. “I found school so boring: I wanted to be at the atelier. The minute I got out of school I went there to see my mother, to see how she worked,” says Venturini Fendi. Adele Fendi was so busy that her daughter would have to call out “Madame Fendi” to get her attention. “My mother went to the hospital directly from work to give birth,” says Venturini Fendi nonplussed. “I was growing up in this world. My mother worked how I work today, so for me it was natural.” I ask her if she is similar to her mother and she replies in the negative with certainty. “We are very different. We have the same strengths for sure, but I have to say I am faster. She was more reflective and I am more instinctive.”
From her mother she gained an eclectic approach to colour. “And that when you see something, what you see is never as you see it. With every object there is something to discover. Even if you see something and say: ‘Oh no, I don’t like this’, there is a way of making it interesting and beautiful to you.”
Her mother and aunts brought in Karl Lagerfeld in 1965. Lagerfeld once said: “Fendi is my Italian version, Chanel my French version and Lagerfeld is my own version, what I always wanted. I never mix it up.” Under his stewardship Fendi readyto-wear has an extravagant whimsy about it – of course it should be inspired by gravitational waves! Venturini Fendi is the label’s sole Fendi family presence today. “The creative studio is exactly the same except I am in place of my mother and my aunts, but Karl is there, and many of the same people are there who worked with us. We have the same family atmosphere. There is a freedom, freedom to talk.”
Lagerfeld helped usher in Fendi’s “fashionisation” of both accessories and fur, the thing Venturini Fendi is most proud of. One of its first endeavours was to make fur more casual, stripping the traditional fur garment of its formal construction by removing the lining. The fur coat is rich with symbolism beyond just fashion, it’s also about class and society. The stripping away of the inner lining was about Fendi’s culture of propelling forward and away from tradition, not just a show of its innovation with fur design.
Of its development of accessories, “Fendi brought them to life in fashion”, says Venturini Fendi, referencing her best-selling Fendi Baguette, designed in 1997. “To me, modern is a way of expression – you need to express what people need in that moment,” she adds, and what people needed was the ease of a bag to be carried under the crook of the arm – like a baguette (the edible kind). For women in the late-90s and early-2000s, the size meant it could be dangled from the wrist and worn with a sequinned, spaghetti-strap mini-dress just as insouciantly as with boot-cut jeans. The blank canvas shape of the bag – a soft rectangle with the minimalist double F logo latch – also made it ideal to be bejewelled and bedazzled for the quirky party-girl era of the 2000s. The very name generates visions of Sarah Jessica Parker as herself and as Carrie Bradshaw, both with myriad Baguettes: beaded, jewelled, sequined, top-stitched, in velvet or leather. “It was treated like a garment: they were a part of fashion. The Baguette brought accessories at Fendi – and also in fashion – into a new dimension,” says the designer. “Bags are not just functional: there is a very high dose of creativity mixed with an exquisite and perfect functionality and beautiful quality.”
It was the Baguette that convinced Venturini Fendi that handbags belonged on the runway. “If your mind is not open to change, there is no way,” she says in her Italian-accented English. Blonde and aristocratic, she appears to be the stereotypical European intellectual – her most recent purchase was a Gio Ponti ceramic and she is currently reading new wave European author Ágota Kristóf. Her demeanour today belies the party-girl image she had growing up. At the age of 18 she travelled as part of the Fendi team on the label’s US trunk show. She’s now taken herself out of the scene. “For me it’s important to watch and not be part of it,” she says. She doesn’t dress in Fendi either, in case it should distract her. “I don’t get attached to things: that’s why I don’t dress in the collection. For me it’s important to watch and not be part of it, because if you get attached to things you cannot evolve.”
Except she is attached to that Gio Ponti ceramic. “I had to have it. It was too expensive, but then I went home and [promised myself] I’d only buy this, because it gave me emotion.” I ask where it sits now. “It’s a very sad story,” she says, grimacing. “A little child broke it. It’s in my closet because I don’t want to see the disaster! I was suffering, but I’m not meant to be attached to things. In a little bit I will get it out and do something.” She plans to salvage one of the fingers and display a ring on it – perhaps one designed by her daughter, jewellery designer Delfina Delettrez Fendi. “You can resolve things with creativity, you see.”