There were two products on display at this evening’s Fendi show; the house’s latest menswear collection and the new €50 million leather goods factory in which all the bags accessorizing Silvia Venturini Fendi’s 57 looks were made. That factory is in Bagno a Ripoli, a Tuscan hamlet 30 minutes outside Florence, and it was no chore to be at this workplace. The long, low, terracotta-hued building is roofed with foliage and designed to sink into the landscape. Butterflies danced through the sunlit herb beds outside as a few impressively dedicated fans clustered in the carpark screamed to see some undetermined celebrity guest.
Inside, pre-show, we were invited to wander and wonder as the fully-staffed factory pretended to go about its business as if 400 or so perspiring menswear people were not there. A guy behind my bench continued to use his laser-guided cutting machine to process a richly dyed calf hide all through the show. A cheery signora gamely tolerated my questions as she stitched a Peekaboo by hand. Tucked away in her corner office, Silvia said: “Here is where our work collides with our sense of family. Sometimes, when a collection is coming, we ask our artisans to work a lot as we develop prototypes and make changes at the last minute, and they are all committed. In fashion you hear a lot about the designer, and the brand, but to be fully transparent you should be able to know who makes the items, and in what conditions. That’s what we want to do today.”
Silvia’s grandmother Adele founded the company 100 years ago next year in a Roman shop that had the atelier in an upstairs backroom. When Silvia was a child, she recalled, her father would drive her to the atelier (a later, expanded one) to collect her mother Anna after work. Even after the bell had rung, Adele would stay. “Because there would be a line of workers waiting to speak to her about work things and personal things, because it was all family. If Adele could be here to see this today? I think she’d be very happy and emotional—and she’d probably have some firm advice.”
There is something old-world, and certainly analog about what the word ‘artisan’ evokes. Yet what was especially notable today is how many of the craftspeople use highly specialized technology to augment their handicraft. “Yes, it looks like a lab, or something out of Silicon Valley,” said Fendi. The workers kept at it as the fruits of their artisan intelligence rolled down the runway.
Bags apart, the collection we saw was inevitably shaped around their labor, then flavored with the genteel kink that has become an ongoing theme here. Topstitched and hammer-looped workwear was reproduced in leather or heavy drill. Work aprons and tool belts—one fully equipped with a set of traditional leather-working tools—were styled into skirts.
To reflect the embedded in nature aspect of the building we were in, many of the pieces were colored by naturally-derived dyes. The net vests and dresses, for instance, were colored in nettle. A few tailoring pieces were embedded with raised jacquard renderings of the flowers that surrounded the factory. And to reflect that every new bag design is prototyped in sailcloth-like salpa paper, said Fendi, the tan fabric in the first two looks and a few later was made in a paper blend. Shoes and sneakers combined clog-like slingbacks and modern molded soles. Prints included toolkits and schematic diagrams of various house bag designs. And the closing few tailored looks featured, said Fendi, a stitching pattern that echoed the internal structure of her grandmother’s earliest Selleria line.
Other specialisms in the umbrella of Fendi metiers were represented by some outrageously crafted pieces in woven mink and shearling. There were trophy pieces in vegetable materials too, including a series of wefted, blurred F-logo jacquards in indigo and undyed denim. The house’s discreet sensuality was expressed in halter neck shirting that exposed the back and two bodies that left a flash of human hide at each hip. Fendi let us in today, and although so much of what we saw was staged for our benefit, it also seemed very genuine too. The look on the faces of the scores of colleagues that Silvia led out at the finale was testament to that.
