Using the Fendi Factory landscape as inspiration, Silvia Venturini reveals its sphere of development. The menswear line comes as a praise to the production chain
Fendi Spring/Summer 24 Menswear at Pitti Uomo
Stitches and sewing machines operating open the Fendi Menswear collection hold at the Fendi Factory headquarters. Made in Fendi is the motto at the entrance welcoming guests inside the very universe of creation. Hold during Pitti Uomo, Fendi Spring Summer 24 collection closed the Florentine fashion show fair.
Over three hundred artisans and employees involved in the craftsmanship took the show portraying a complete production mechanism with an organic and transparent allure. Self-referential, the collection was inspired by working attire, restyling office items like shirts and ties alongside kinky overalls. With reiterated jeans and netted tops, everything felt fresh and revitalized, conducting a path between classic and contemporary masculinity.
The spring-summer collection felt like a style elongation of the 2022 Fendi Menswear held at the Palazzo della Civilta in Rome, the brand premises. It was the only other time Fendi detached from fashion calendars and the Milanese fashion week, and it was so it could make a point.
Fendi – Brand identity and artisanship in the core of Tuscany
With Silvia Venturini Fendi at its helm, the brand used these two opportunities to show its DNA, to portray the row identity conserved as an addition to the eye-candy design. As the designer used to confess at the time, Venturi is «an accessory addict».
Show-stopping cropped shirts mixed with low wasted trousers from the 22 spring line – this was long before the Miu Miu Mania. «I like to use garments by also treating them as accessories», she explained.
And we witness bits of the same creative process for the Fendi Factory show, where badges and measure tapes became desirable accessories. Lab glasses are restyled for the eyewear line with see-through lenses, while the handyman core evolves through tool belts and aprons crafted in leather work and styled as mini skirts.
Hedonistic silhouettes and handyman-core – Fendi Factory in Tuscany
The man’s silhouette is at a turning point, norm twists are boiling up. Silvia Venturini is daring through details, conveying a labeled wardrobe. The classic shirt so impregnated in the Fendi vocabulary takes a spin-off, with falling shoulders and long lengths, whereas mono-colored bodies are cropped enough to show the skin of the hips.
In mineral blue hues, overly cut sleeveless shirt dresses are paired with flowing trousers. Something of a sensual chic overlapping a straightforward dynamism, the spring collection becomes an ode to working. «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», Venturini explains.
Part of her intent is to give a new dimension to the creative process, bringing knowledge and tangible process to the fore. «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».
The Fendi SS24 collection inspired by Adele Fendi
Inspiration didn’t come solely from the fashion mechanism. One of the few family houses, Fendi is well known for its heritage and for recognizing the past to evolve. Maybe the general theme clings to how addictive meaning work can be, and how it crosses generations, motivating change and innovation.
This is the case for Fendi Menswear 24, where the art director recalls her mother, Anna at the atelier, where Silvia and her father would pick her up after the day was over. Her grandmother, Adele, who founded the empire one hundred years ago, would stay, however.
«Because there would be a line of workers waiting to speak to her about work things and personal things because it was all family», the designer remembers. «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».
Fendi SS24 – Natural dyes and vegetable materials
The color palette absorbed the Tuscan landscape and its energetic shades tingling through soft earthy hues. With many of the collection items being dyed in naturally-derived colors, the hues spear as harmonious as they can be. Making use of its surroundings, the tailoring pieces borrowed the jacquard prints from the flowers around the factory. Vegetable material made their way to the fore as indigo F-logo pieces.
There were cult culture items like bags in the shape of coffee cup carriers enveloped with the brand logo and signature color duo. Hand stitching was an integral part of the show that presented new designs crafted in sailcloth-like salpa paper and paper blend. Molding sneakers came in the company of green socks suggesting comfort over elegance, while prints followed the leitmotif of working tools. To make the past present, Venturi inserted tailored looks with stitching patterns that recall the internal structure of her grandmother’s earliest Selleria line.
Fendi Factory is a new arena for creation
Menswear collection often bends the question of where the pole of menswear fashion resides. Saint Laurent presented in Berlin Fendi and became the special guest at Pitti Uomo, marking the first appearance of the brand in the Florentine fashion scene. With a softly futuristic vision for what ateliers and artisanship mean today, Silvia Venturini allowed herself to experiment with comfort zones and honest storytelling in a place that «looks like a lab or something out of Silicon Valley».
In 2022 Fendi inaugurated a craftsmanship shelter, a building that could envelope all the production operations for the Roman Maison. This is how Fendi Factory was born, a 14,000 square meters building designed by the Milanese studio Piuarch and landscape architect Antonio Perazzi, the mind behind projects such as Manifattura Tabacchi (in Florence) or Il Giardino Delle Magnolie (in Lugano, Switzerland).
Deeply rooted in the core of Tuscany, the production factory continues the heritage of Italian manufacturers recognized all over the world. The building is found in Bagno a Ripoli, only twenty minutes from Florence, and crafted through an intertwinement with the idyllic natural surroundings. Fendi Factory took the spot of an old quarry that requested restoration interventions, and it is now home to the brand’s administrative offices.
Completed by a warehouse, laboratories, a school of high leather goods, and a restaurant, the structure embodies a complete design process, remaining witness to the quality and meaningful creative activities. If Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (EUR) persists as the primary monument to represent Fendi – its mind and heart – the Factory becomes its body, a place where things happen and come to life, mirroring the transparency and sustainability values Fendi pursues.
Pioneering hierarchy refusal, Fendi Factory is a horizontal production organism with a single level of manufacture with a shape determined by the needs of the fabrication process. A transparent wall between each creative department welcomes collaboration and communicative exchange, pushing toward circular innovation.
The Fendi Factory – uniting landscape with the manufacture
Piuarch partner, Gino Garbellini confesses in an interview how «the idea was to reconstruct a natural landscape through architecture that disappears within the landscape itself». He believes that «when an architectural project also includes a landscape project, the symbiosis with the environment develops naturally».
Due to this architectural perspective, the building continues a dialogue with its surroundings, elongating the refreshing views with interior greenery, becoming part of the site’s native ecosystem
Founded in 1925 as a fur and leather shop in Rome, Fendi presents at Pitti Uomo in Florence for the first time, uniting the Italian cities.
The Fendi menswear show bridges the Florentine catwalks with the Milanese Fashion Week. Fun Fur – their logo and essence, a family business traversing generations, managing to innovate the industry through new techniques and silhouettes. In 1992, Silvia Venturini Fendi became the artistic director of accessories and menswear, and in 1997 she wrote a page of Fashion history when taking the Fendi Baguette bag on stage.
«Fendi has always been a story of women and a man», is one of Venturini Fendi’s sayings. It emphasizes the importance of menswear for the Italian house, where his clothing and designs are a story told by women envisioning the masculine wardrobe. It means predicting masculinity while cultivating the ability to stay traditional, twisting boundaries from within.
