Yes, this show ran 45 minutes late: but what’s a few extra minutes after a hundred years? And true, multiple models took wrong turns as they navigated a runway designed to replicate the space in Fendi’s atelier where during the 1960s and 1970s, by night, the founding family held its social salons. But then isn’t any great party hard to leave?
Silvia Fendi opened this 100th anniversary Fendi show with a flashback to her first ever house of Fendi memory. This was when, at his first show there in 1966, Karl Lagerfeld asked Silvia (then aged six) to walk the runway in a cute little equestrian outfit. Today, at the end of the runway, supersized replicas the doors of Fend’s OG atelier were opened by her grandchildren, Tazio and Dardo, (both also aged six) wearing replicas of that original outfit.
Their inclusion meant that this show spanned five generations of Fendi. Broadly, there were relatively few literal references either to individuals or the archives in a collection Silvia had said she shaped to transmit “the emotion and the adrenaline” of her own sense of the house “through its codes.” However the slouchy knit beanies hung with netting were a direct salute to Adele, the house’s founding mother: Silvia said her grandmother always used to frame her face with netting attached to her chignon. One satisfyingly rich detail on tonight’s runway was that the chignons, when they featured, were worked into a horizontal figure-8 infinity symbol.
Co-ed shows are only rarely satisfyingly symmetrical as fashion presentations, because womenswear will almost always steal the show. Here there was a great deal of interplay between the genders via kid hair mohair knits in broad horizontal degrade stripes, the embroidered embellishments, the cashmere polos, the two mink coats in zigzag stripes of tonal house browns, and even the nail art. Certain menswear items, like the lemon yellow yolk-hemmed caban coat that was an obvious Silvia-for-Silvia piece, were standouts. But as is normal, the menswear was overshadowed.
Tonight that felt absolutely right at a show celebrating a house lead by three generations of women, and a show where Silvia was having a rare opportunity to stand behind Fendi’s womenswear. To mark the fact that fur, while central to Fendi, has always been just part of its offer she offered collarless coats and dresses that featured furry facades (in either mohair or shearling) that looked like the reveres of these garments but were in fact removable stoles. All of the blockbuster fur coats (with the exception of the zigzag minks) were made in shearling. The house’s recently appointed CEO announced in an interview today that Fendi is opening a new “fur atelier” in the Milan store it will open in September, and Fendi’s mastery of this material was evident in the techniques on show in its coats tonight. The red spotted dress was a particularly bravura example of this house’s craft.
Lace-edged drop waist gowns (a personal easter egg reference back to a coat in that 1966 show that Silvia yearned after), check separates, house Pequin stripe dresses, and banana shouldered dresses in quilted leather seemed to faintly echo the 1920s, ’50s, ’70s and ’80s respectively. “I like the testimony of time,” said Silvia. “I touched different decades, but I also try to avoid a specific one… I give a lot of respect to the fact that when something is beautiful, it’s beautiful always.” Ready-to-wear at Fendi only began in 1977 when Karl Lagerfeld introduced it, and following his death in 2019 Silvia successfully assumed that responsibility for several seasons. Tonight she took up the mantle once again to present a collection that acted as a richly resonant reflection of her family house’s 100 year history, but which also stood alone as a highly desirable seasonal offering. If the memory of this show affects Tazio and Dardo as deeply as its 1966 equivalent did their grandmother, then the creative lineage of the Fendi clan should have plenty of decades in it yet.
