For Spring Summer 2024, Fendi personifies the corporate artisan.

In the modern day, the ideals of craftsmanship appear to be steeped in the past’s painstaking practices and orthodox traditions. If the present solely regards automation and the industrial, how can fashion honour diligence and dedication? Fendi does it in two ways. Spanning the literal and allegorical, its Spring Summer 2024 menswear collection creates a new archetype, themed ‘corporate artisan’. Propagating self-referential exercises that permeate its techniques and offerings, workwear sheds its working-class association for the season.

In an ode to the historic Fendi Factory in Capannuccia, pattern-print graphics of craft apparatus and tailoring marks complement the sophisticated silhouettes of the Baguette and Peekaboo. It is an artful trompe loeil exertion: goods are intentionally presented with a guise of incompletion, likened to that of nature’s biorhythm – raw, unfinished, imperfect, and furthered by mineral dye colouring and natural fibres of raffia and Washi paper. But within in its crude exteriors is Fendi’s polished statement, a reminder of the prodigal child parable. That even with precision-backed technology and innovative upheavals, the rudimentary always remains, and the coupling of the craft and innovation is inextricably linked.

Once you’re done with this story, click here to catch up with our March 2024 issue.