Fendi wields its mastery of craft to the delicates of shearlings and fur — hand-picked and then hand-woven to form the FW23 hero of the Peekaboo Shearling Interlace.
What qualifies one a mastery of materials? For the house of Fendi, it is perhaps its Fall/Winter 2023 Peekaboo variants: softened with shearling and made whole with an artisanal interlace. More than just decorative, the techniques behind the stitch-aplenty offerings adopted by artistic director
Silvia Venturini Fendi and team reflect the house’s continued diligence to detail. For the season, the Peekaboo — which can be documented to be the house’s hero bag of late is dichotomous: moulded and formed in the use of dainty, fragile stripes of some of the daintier, more fragile materials, but retain a firmness in endurance and toughness; all in thanks to the workmanship that acts synonymous to the Fendi name. The delicate touch of craftsmen coalesces with the lightness of the selected materiality to yield the final, buoyant interlace offering. But in privy, house artisans take on the challenge of balance: of wielding a firm hand to select, slice, and loom the fine strips of shearling and fur that will eventually fasten and secure each component into the final purse form. For the medium, 630 perforations are hand-bored, before inviting the manual interlace process with the connecting slivers. Each stripe, meticulously-curated and totalling to 4.5 meters of lavish shearling. The ISeeU iteration is a similar reflection of this undertaking: a three-strand shearling braid is handcrafted to comprise its handle.
Across the collection, inners are intentionally left unlined, a design decision that seems metaphorical for the mason. Intricate interlace are exposed to the eye, reiterating Fendi’s testament to fashioning beauty that goes beyond the surface. For a house with beginnings entrenched in delicate and ultra-lux materials, Fall/Winter ’23 reveals its presiding advantage in working with intricacies. Chronicled for its dominance in exquisites, the family business first unspooled with atelier origins. Its current-day alchemist ability: in transforming even the gentlest of textiles to become the hero component for the season, underscores this. In transcending artisanal standards of craft, there seems to be merit in the unparalleled perceptiveness borne through decades of virtuosity.
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