Fendi Fall/Winter 2022-23 Haute Couture

Lindsay Judge   |   08-07-2022

While Rome will always be home for Fendi, this season Artistic Director of Womenswear and Couture Kim Jones, wanted to explore further afield than just the eternal city and bring together global elements.

 

This season, I wanted to step away from Rome, or at least I wanted to place Rome in a global context,” He said in the show notes.

 

 

 “In this collection, we are looking at fragments of different cities, namely Kyoto, Paris and Rome. The fragmentary nature of things is echoed throughout the collection, like snatches of memory or the impression of things past, present and future.”

 

The result is a beautiful cosmopolitan offering which perfectly captures cultures and traditions from all around the world.

 

 

Starting with the traditional Japanese kimono, Jones took fabric from 18th Century traditional dress which became a foundation for many of the looks that took a modern interpretation of this precious garment.

 

 

Kata Yuzen, a painstaking hand printing and painting technique which has remained unchanged for many hundreds of years, is once again utilised for these fabrications. Made in Kyoto as traditional silk panels, here they are sliced and asymmetrically reformed in floor-length dress silhouettes. The cascading Acer palmatum leaves from the fabric design – named Ode to Autumn in the 1700s – find various forms throughout, particularly in the proliferation of delicate embroideries that reach a crescendo in the final tulle gowns of the collection.

 

 

Jones and the craftspeople of the Fendi ateliers approach the couture collection as a palimpsest, where iterations, transparencies and fragments of the past go to make up the present and move subtly into the future.

 

 

Shimmering fabrics, embroidery, embellishment and iridescent fabrics make for a luminous collection that captures the light as it moves. Intercepted by bold colours, the collection is both light and eyecatching.

 

There are many parallels drawn throughout this collection: East and West, masculine and feminine, natural and manmade, traditional and modern; each linking together in unique harmony.

 

 

A sense of French ‘Japonisme’ and art deco ornament in the flou, is joined by a more Italian take on the tailleur in the Vicuna, leather and fur work. Nods to masculine codes of tailoring are found in Vicuna fabric suiting and cognac calf leather pieces, with their structures, emphasised internally and at times externally.

 

 

There are also personal pleasures, just for the wearer in the construction of many of the items – internally, traditional Japanese fabrics are used as linings and quiltings in suiting as well as in underpinnings in dresses.

 

The supreme skills of the FENDI fur atelier are on display in the intarsia construction of the shaved mink suiting. Here, an abstract reinterpretation of another traditional Japanese fabric fragment from the eighteenth century is realised – named Rope Mountain, it both grounds and monumentalises the collection.

 

 

The presentation also marks the introduction of Fendi Flavus a unique high jewellery collection designed by Artistic Director of Jewelry Delfina Delettrez Fendi. An impressive yellow and white diamond collection was revealed on the runway.

 

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