“Ciao, mamma.” Delfina Delettrez Fendi and her mother, Silvia Venturini Fendi, are in different parts of Rome, I’m peering at them both on a screen in London. Past, present, future … is there anyone in fashion better equipped to talk about that trinity than a Fendi? Delfina is fourth generation, after all. But despite the weight of heritage, Fendi is the least predictable of the big luxury brands. For that, credit is due to Silvia, daughter of Anna, the second born of the formidable five Fendi sisters who transformed the family business, not least by hiring Karl Lagerfeld as creative director in 1965.
Silvia originally fled any sense of familial obligation and made jewellery on a beach in Brazil for a time. Maybe that helped her settle with her Fendi past. There’s a word that Delfina, now also a jeweller of international renown, uses when she talks about her own passage through the Fendi legacy: errare, meaning not only “to make a mistake” but also “to wander”. So Silvia wandered, before returning to Rome to wrestle the albatross of legacy to the ground. And, for at least the past few decades, she has been responsible for infusing the brand with what she and I agree has always been a winningly perverse spirit, with Lagerfeld as an equally winning sinner.
Now he is no longer with us, and Silvia has repositioned Fendi for the future by taking on Kim Jones to fill his size 40s. Since Jones graduated from Central Saint Martins almost 20 years ago, he has built a substantial reputation on moving menswear’s goalposts, so his appointment as artistic director of the label’s haute couture and ready-to-wear for women was a bold move for him, and for Fendi. But typical, too. Like Fendi’s new factory, in a valley in Tuscany, built with attention to the environment, so that it sits almost transparent among the greenery. And like Fendi’s Hand in Hand initiative, which was launched for
