Fendi’s Soft/Hard AW22 Show: 5 Things to Know

“The best way to explore the Fendi archives is through the Fendi wardrobes,” said creative director Kim Jones of the AW22 collection. Here are five thinngs to know about Fendi’s Soft/Hard AW22 Collection.

The collection was inspired by Fendi’s SS00 line.

1/5

Kim Jones has been delving into Fendi’s codes and what they imply to a younger generation of buyers since joining the brand a year ago. That’s no easy chore, given that this house was constructed around fur and handbags. While everyone is familiar with Karl Lagerfeld’s Fendi logo, “the Fendi style” is probably more mysterious. “I’m still working on them,” he said backstage to Vogue, making reference to the codes. “But I’m looking at points in time that are relevant for now.”

That collection embodied what Lagerfeld would call to as “the excruciating lightness of existence” in his customary weighted elegance: airy, diaphanous, buoyant garments, which he’d occasionally layer to create filtrage illusions that felt like contemporary art.

It was a contest of soft vs. hard.

2/5

Referring to the soft side of the collection’s transparent slip dresses, bustiers, and pyjama-like shirts and pants – Jones remarked “There’s something quite lingerie about Fendi,”.

Tailoring, on the other hand, was sharp, tight, and layered with tone panels that imparted an industrial aspect to it, as inspired by the SS86 collection. The tunnel-like concrete runway Jones had created within Fendi’s in-house show room added a chilliness to looks that were otherwise tactile in essence. Concrete and chiffon, and how to combine the two. Women are both rough and soft, Jones continued.

Fendi’s SS86 collection was also highlighted.

3/5

Jones combined his SS00 recollections with reinterpretations of the motifs Lagerfeld used in his Fendi spring/summer 1986 collection, a salute to the Memphis movement’s geometric language. The combination of the two memories resulted in a Fendi collection that occasionally echoed the late designer’s ethos, but through a lens tailored to the bolder, more erotic, and more erotic female image that today dominates social media.

Bags were in more abundance than ever before.

4/5

Bags must be at the center of any collection that aims to explore and define Fendi’s codes. Jones and Venturini, the brand’s accessories director, went all out, adorning practically every outfit with a bag, and occasionally multiple bags, such as the little bags attached to the garments. There were three Baguette revivals, one in cashmere, one in shearling-lined leather, and one in intarsia mink, as well as additions to Fendi’s Hand-in-Hand project, which commissions artists from around Italy to interpret the Baguette.

The Memphis concept was inspired by Delfina Delettrez.

5/5

Jones’s approach at Fendi is centered on the family. He examines how the Fendi women dress, shop, and borrow from one another while working side by side with Silvia Venturini Fendi and her daughter Delfina Delettrez. Delettrez, in fact, was the driving force behind the Memphis collection’s reintroduction.