Silvia Venturini Fendi: ‘To be noticed, you need to be decorated’

When it comes to fashion house headquarters, Fendi has everyone else beat. The place the brand has called home since 2015 is Rome’s Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a vast, creamy travertine marble building known as the “square colosseum” with views of miles around.

Near the top of the tower (commissioned in the 1930s by Fascist dictator Mussolini), Silvia Venturini Fendi — the 62-year-old head of Fendi’s accessories, menswear and childrenswear, and granddaughter of the label’s founders — is putting the finishing touches to her latest spring/summer 2024 menswear collection, which will be presented in Capannuccia, near Florence, on June 15. “It’s non-stop work, basically,” she says via Zoom from her studio. As if to prove the point, she’s swamped by sketches and swatches pinned high on the walls around her.

Venturini Fendi has been working for the family business — established in 1925 as a made-to-order fur specialist — since her early twenties. After periods answering phones and dealing with customers in Fendi’s Rome and Rodeo Drive boutiques, Venturini Fendi began designing for the house in 1987, heading a younger line named Fendissime.

In 1992, at the suggestion of the brand’s late creative director Karl Lagerfeld, she was promoted to lead Fendi’s accessories business, working alongside him until his death in 2019. She now works with artistic director of womenswear Kim Jones, appointed in 2020. Besides her daughter Delfina Delettrez Fendi, 36, who heads up jewellery, she’s the only Fendi scion left in the casa.

Work, incidentally, forms the inspiration and framework for Fendi’s latest men’s collection. Though based in Rome, Fendi usually shows its ready-to-wear collections in Milan. But this season, the brand has decamped to Tuscany to present its new collection in its new factory in Capannuccia — the area where it has long manufactured its leather goods.

The new plant is the result of five years of development, according to Fendi chief executive Serge Brunschwig. Composed of terracotta (in very Fendi shades of brown) and glass, it is surrounded by greenery and olive trees. “So we are going also to do our olive oil very soon,” Venturini Fendi says, seemingly only half-joking.

For Venturini Fendi, all that glass has two meanings. “It’s an optic of transparency . . . I think that people, especially the young generation, they want to know what they eat, they want to know who is behind the object they buy.” She pauses. “When you experience something luxury, you experience it through the price. Well, to get to that price you sometimes wonder why? How?”

The answer, according to Venturini Fendi, is in this high-tech new facility — the handcraft and the artisans behind it. “[The factory] is like a diamond stuck in the hill . . . and those people, who are as precious as a diamond, they work there . . . I wanted to put people in the centre of the storytelling,” she says.

Craftspeople also influenced her spring/summer 2024 clothes, Venturini Fendi says. “I’ve been looking at the people that were working there. But I also was thinking about our leathers, because this is the factory where we do leather goods. So leather is another keyword, but I want it to be minimal . . . minimal workwear I would say, but very chic workwear.”

That seems to reflect what Venturini Fendi wears herself — today, a short, single-breasted white cotton jacket halfway between a French bleu de travail jacket and the smocks sported by workers in couture ateliers. “Very practical,” she says. “For somebody who has so much to do.”

[The factory] is like a diamond stuck in the hill . . . and those people, who are as precious as a diamond, they work there

The importance of craft is promoted by many luxury goods houses, but craft is what catapulted both Venturini Fendi and her family’s label to global attention. In the late 1990s, Fendi was a somewhat dusty Roman house — fur, after all, was falling out of fashion (Fendi is one of the few houses to still offer the real stuff) and the label’s clothes had never elicited the same fervour as the designs of its overtly glamorous countrymen.

Then, in 1997, Venturini Fendi designed a rectilinear handbag on a short strap — designed to be worn clamped in your armpit, like a loaf of French bread. It was wryly named the Baguette, featured in a plotline on Sex and the City and differentiated itself from rivals’ would-be luxury “It” bags with its dazzling surface techniques — embroidery, tapestry, knit, leatherwork, encrusted with freshwater pearls.

That bag’s near-immediate popularity helped propel Fendi to a valuation of $900mn in 1999, the year the Fendi family sold a controlling 51 per cent to a partnership between LVMH and Prada. In 2001, LVMH bought out Prada to be the solo majority stake: by that date, Fendi had expanded its number of stores globally from four to 83 (today it has more than 200). In 2015, the label hit €1bn in estimated annual revenue, according to Citi luxury analyst Thomas Chauvet — he estimates 2022 turnover at €2.2bn, with operating margin close to 20 per cent. The Baguette is still a marquee product and there is now also a men’s version.

Venturini Fendi says it was the film director Luca Guadagnino, a friend and collaborator, who made her realise that Fendi had to offer the Baguette for men, in 2019. “He called me one day and he said, ‘Listen, I have to go for the weekend to a friend’s house. She’s a very chic lady. Can you help me to select the most beautiful Baguette?’ So I said, ‘OK, take this.’ When I met him again, I said, ‘So did she like the Baguette?’ He said, ‘You know what? I didn’t give her. I kept it for myself.’”

Venturini has been including the Baguette in menswear collections ever since, strapped cross-body or around the waist, alongside other accessories such as a top-handle bag named the Peekaboo, also originally for women.

“It has been an interesting experiment, in the last few years, to launch some iconic bags, like the Peekaboo and even the Baguette, for men,” says Brunschwig. “Frankly, I don’t see a lot of competition. I don’t say that in a lot of sectors, but in this one it is the case.” He also singles out jewellery as a category that is “skyrocketing” for men and women alike.

When I ask Venturini Fendi if she designs differently for men and women, she says not, followed rapidly by “12 different ways”. “We see a lot of men wearing our women’s collection and we see the opposite also,” she says. There’s plenty of crossover — the brand’s last autumn/winter menswear collection featured knit cardigans elongated and draped like dresses. Fendi menswear is often flashy — frequently logo-studded, in luxurious fabrics and with intricate detailing. Even with the promise of minimalism for this forthcoming show, Fendi is a loud voice in Italian menswear: refined, but perhaps an antidote to the quiet luxury movement.

And for Venturini Fendi, that quality is distinctly Roman — and hence part of Fendi’s DNA. “You know, when you are born in Rome, you are not afraid of decoration,” she says. “Once my mother said, why do we like to dress up in Rome? Because when you go to a dinner in a private house, you are close to a Caravaggio painting. And to be noticed, you need to be decorated.”