Fendi

Since 2008 FENDI has been supporting limited edition creativity and design through its  partnership with Design Miami in Miami, Milan and Basel. The Roman fashion house shares important values with the design world, such as boundless creativity, excellence, quality and a passion for making things by hand. Each project developed since 2008 represents a wonderful admixture and « contamination » between design and fashion, highlighting their creative, functional, experimentation and research affinities.

For its first collaboration in December 2008, FENDI presented the ‘Design Talks’ in Miami : round tables with such designers as Aranda/Lasch, the brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana, Tom Dixon and Arik Levy.

In 2009, the luxury house showed great audacity at Milan’s Salone del Mobile, with the design performance entitled Craft Punk, in line with the dictates of sustainable development and individualism. For the occasion, the FENDI space was transformed into a large atelier where designers provided live demonstrations of their work, often in collaboration with FENDI’s artisans, reinventing workmanship methods or the way materials were traditionally employed.  Among the participants : Simon Hasan, Sarah Becker, Nacho Carbonell, Kwangho Lee, Raw-Edges, Peter Marigold and Studio Glithero. In December 2009, once again experimentation was key in a multi-sensorial performance entitled Stereo Craft , created in collaboration with the designer Moritz Waldemeyer.

In April 2010 in Milan FENDI presented a fascinating and astonishing group show called Design Vertigo, which allowed the public to interact with works of art conceived by Felice Varini, rAndom International, Graham Hudson and Beta Tank. The following December, in 2010, FENDI presented Modern Primitives with the architectural studio Aranda-Lasch, featuring a collection of furniture and objects that resemble over-scaled minerals, transformed by Silvia Venturini Fendi through the application of FENDI fur and leather.

In 2011 FENDI presented Craft Alchemy by Elisa Strozyk and Sebastian Neeb, a collection of leather inlaid furniture, with references to the 18th century, underscoring the distorted and humoristic way we often look at the past.

In 2012, FENDI brought its Design Performance program to Design Miami/ Basel presenting Craftica with Italian design studio Formafantasma.  In collaboration with a FENDI craftsman, designers Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin  created a new body of work exploring leathercraft in conversation with other hand-worked, natural materials to reveal the essential, enduring beauty of leather and handcraft within the context of contemporary living. In December, FENDI presented  a collaboration with the acclaimed Belgian designer Maarten de Ceulaer: thanks to the Transformations collection, characterized by radical and abstract lines inspired by FENDI’s classic Pequin motif – itself inspired by Futurism, Bauhaus and Art Deco- the roman luxury house revealed the new version of a furniture item inspired by modernism.