The FENDI Fall/Winter 2023 Haute Couture collection celebrates the finest in couture traditions, combined with a lighter, more approachable attitude. With a focus on volume, fluidity, draper and ease for the wearer, Kim Jones, Artistic Director of Womenswear, addressed the growing demand for couture to become more wearable while still honouring the traditions of fine craftsmanship.
“This season, we wanted to concentrate on the achievement of fluidity, drape and shape through couture techniques, bringing these elements together with the attitude of today.” Said Jones.
This collection also provided the opportunity for FENDI to present its debut high jewellery collection designed by Delfina Delettrez Fendi. The Artistic Director of FENDI Jewellery’s approach was to see the jewellery design as an extension of Haute Couture design. The two designers work closely to create a seamless collection.
“We worked on a template based on Delfina’s high jewellery. If there is no jewellery, the idea is still present through the colour palette and embellishment in the collection; the clothes themselves take on the idea of jewellery. Colours come from flesh tones as well as that of stones: black diamonds, rubies, sapphires. There is a play of soft and hard, flesh and stone.” Said Jones.
Delfina Delettrez Fendi added: “There is an emotional relationship that I have with the jewellery in the collection that I hope the women who will eventually wear it will have too. There is an obsessive precision you need to make jewellery like this, such small objects that have such strength, meaning and personality. And yet, in the end, they have a direct and intimate relationship to the body; they are a profound and personal extension of the woman.”
The collection combines simplicity with complexity, a story of contrasts. A clean, elegant silhouette is given depth by hidden intricacies through complex and rigorous pattern cutting. Many garments are created with one single seam. Second-skin silks, intricate knits, neoprene tailored furs and FENDI chevron feathered shearlings add a sense of elevated glamour.
Precision and emotion, the real and the refined, are also found in Delfina Delettrez Fendi’s approach to high jewellery. The jewellery pieces are presented in a FENDI colour palette of exceptional white and yellow diamonds together with green, orange and pink Padparadscha sapphires and spinels. The collection of pink spinels alone, that feature in the ‘Undarum’ set, took forty years to gather together and will probably never be replicated in nature again.
The discreetly multifaceted nature of this couture collection reaches a crescendo in embroidery techniques that unite the clothing and jewellery worlds. While clutching their jewel box minaudière, the mood builds with models scattered with jewel-like embellishments or layered with a stratification of intricate stacked tonal paillettes and stones at the closing of the show. To achieve the glittering rose glow of the final look, it took 1200 hours of handwork.
