Luxury Special: How Silvia Venturini Fendi is keeping the brand relevant

FOR SILVIA VENTURINI FENDI, honorary president and former creative director of Fendi, India begins with a sari. Not with its spectacle, though there’s plenty of that. Not with the gold, the embroidery or the colour. What draws her in is something more fundamental — the extraordinary ability of a simple garment to become something entirely different, without losing its essence. “What fascinates me most about India is the elegance of the sari,” she says, describing it as “one of the most beautiful and essential garments”, and yet one capable of extraordinary transformation. From the simplicity of cotton to the richness of embroidery and gold, she sees in it an idea that has long been central to her own creative vocabulary: the power of reinvention. “The shape can be incredibly simple, but it can be reinvented endlessly,” she says, drawing an unexpected parallel with the Baguette bag she created for Fendi. “It reminds me, in a way, of the Baguette… It is always the same, and yet always different... In some ways, it also reminds me of the way Roman women used to dress, with all that beautiful draping and wrapping of fabric around the body. There is something very sensual and sophisticated about the way it falls over the shoulder and wraps around the arm.” That thought could almost serve as a manifesto for Fendi itself. For a house that has been around for more than a century, staying relevant has never meant standing still. Its story is one of constant transformation — of taking something rooted in tradition and finding new ways of making it speak to the present. Family, craftsmanship, Roman identity and an appetite for the unexpected have remained at its core; almost everything else has been open to reinvention. It is a philosophy Silvia knows intimately. She did not simply grow up around Fendi. She grew up inside it. Born into the third generation of the Fendi family, she was surrounded from childhood by the Roman maison’s ateliers, craftsmanship and creative energy. Her first appearance in a Fendi show came when she was just seven. “My earliest memories of Fendi are inseparable from my family memories. For me, my mother’s professional life and our private life were never really separate; everything was connected. I sometimes joke that the ‘Fendi DNA’ was already in my baby [feeding] bottle. I was literally raised on fashion,” she says. The archives place that first official appearance in 1967. Karl Lagerfeld had asked Silvia’s mother whether her children could take part in one of his shows — a collection dedicated to the family, arriving at a moment when society itself was changing rapidly. “It was a collection dedicated to the family, which was particularly significant at a time of great social and cultural change,” Silvia recalls. “Those were the years of the women’s rights movement, of new ideas about gender, and of the rise of unisex fashion. Karl created a collection that explored both womenswear and menswear, and he also brought children into the picture.” For Silvia, however, the significance went beyond the runway. It was her first sense of belonging to the world her mother and aunts were building. “I felt that I belonged to something. Looking back, I think that was when I truly fell in love with Fendi and with this world, and I knew I wanted to remain part of it.” That sense of belonging would become one of the defining threads of her relationship with the house — and would come full circle, decades later. At Fendi’s centenary, Silvia created a bridge between generations. Her daughter Delfina’s children, around the same age Silvia had been during her first show, opened a recreation of the maison’s historic atelier entrance wearing the same look she had worn as a child. “I wanted to create a bridge between the past and the future,” she says. “Seeing them there was incredibly emotional for me. It was a very simple gesture, but it carried so much meaning.” The moment carries the essence of Fendi: history without nostalgia, heritage without stagnation. Where it all began The idea goes all the way back to the woman who started it. Fendi was founded in 1925 by Silvia’s grandmother, Adele Casagrande Fendi, whose determination and entrepreneurial instinct helped create what would become one of Rome’s biggest luxury houses. Adele’s story itself was one of reinvention. She went to Florence, where she stayed with cousins involved in the leather-goods business, intent on learning the trade and finding her own path. “She was an extraordinary woman, someone who was ahead of her time and who contributed, in her own way, to the transformation of women’s lives and roles in Italy,” Silvia recalls. “This year, my sister Maria Teresa also wrote a beautiful book about her, Adele F, which paints a very intense portrait of our grandmother.” Adele returned to Rome and opened her own business with her husband. “He took care of the administrative side of the business, while she was responsible for the creative direction.” Soon, the boutique became a destination for Rome’s elegant women. The word travelled: “Let’s go to Signora Fendi; she has the most beautiful things, made with extraordinary craftsmanship.” Leather goods and fur were at the heart of the business. But it was the next generation — Silvia’s mother and her four sisters — that began pushing the house towards a radically different future. With their father gone, the five sisters took charge. “The five sisters brought an extraordinary new wave of creativity to the company. They wanted to reflect the changing times,” Silvia says. They understood something that would become central to Fendi’s identity: heritage is only useful if one is willing to challenge it. Fur, then a powerful symbol of wealth and status, became one of the places where that challenge played out. “Very often, husbands bought fur coats for their wives as a way of displaying their wealth: the larger and richer the fur, the more successful the husband was perceived to be,” she explains. But women’s lives were changing, and the sisters understood that the clothes had to change with them. “Women were wearing these extremely heavy garments, which were protected by layer upon layer of lining because they were considered so precious. My mother and her sisters understood that this had to change. Fur needed to become a lighter, more modern garment, something that reflected the transformation taking place in women’s lives.” Then came Karl Lagerfeld. The sisters invited the young German designer to work with Fendi as a consultant in 1965-66. What began as a professional collaboration would become one of fashion’s greatest creative partnerships, and one of the longest. “The story between Fendi and Karl is, in many ways, the opposite of what happens today,” Silvia says. “Today, designers often move from one maison to another. For us, Karl became almost a member of the family.” For more than five decades, Lagerfeld’s imagination and the family’s ability to turn imagination into reality became the engine of Fendi. “Fendi built its identity around these women, but also built its identity around this extraordinary man,” Silvia reflects. What made the relationship extraordinary was not simply Lagerfeld’s talent. It was the ecosystem around him — the Roman workshops, the artisans, the sisters and their instinctive understanding of materials and technique. Silvia remembers Lagerfeld as “an incredibly intelligent man, with a profound cultural background,” fascinated not only by Fendi but by the Italian ecosystem that made the house possible. Italy, she points out, remains one of the few countries to have preserved “an almost intact creative and manufacturing ecosystem in fashion”, built around small and medium-sized businesses, many of them family-run. “Karl found that fascinating,” she recalls. He also understood the family itself was part of Fendi’s creative strength. “He enjoyed being surrounded by the five sisters, and their children.” The children could be around during work sessions, but Silvia says Lagerfeld never saw them as an interruption. “Quite the opposite: he understood that this was part of Fendi’s strength — the sense of family.” She recalls an interesting story about how the unlikely creative chemistry worked. Lagerfeld would sometimes arrive from Paris with Polaroids taken along the way. Once, the images were of freshly ploughed fields around Maccarese. He looked at them and said simply: “This is what I want.” The rest was left to the Fendi family. “The next time we came in, there would be tables covered with samples, experiments and new techniques,” she recalls. Lagerfeld could imagine almost anything. The Fendi family had the extraordinary ability to make those imaginings tangible. “They had an extraordinary ability to translate his imagination into reality,” says Silvia. The seamless marriage of fantasy and execution became a defining characteristic of the house. “That relationship between Karl’s extraordinary vision and the family’s ability to turn that vision into reality was fundamental to the identity of Fendi,” Silvia recalls. And yet, perhaps the greatest lesson Fendi took from all this was that preserving an identity does not mean preserving an image. “The key to preserving the family DNA is not to simply reproduce what the family did in the past, but to understand the values that made it meaningful and continue to interpret them in new ways.” It is a distinction that matters. Fendi’s DNA is not a particular silhouette, logo or material. It is the instinct to experiment while respecting the hand that makes the experiment possible. Its transition into LVMH was, in that sense, another evolution rather than an abandonment of the past. “The transition was a natural one, because times change and the world evolves,” says Silvia. As the family grew, the business needed to change with it. “At a certain point, we realised that our family business needed to evolve into a company with a different kind of structure and different business logic.” With eleven cousins in the third generation, succession was becoming an unavoidable question. “Sooner or later we had to address that question,” Silvia recalls. The family ultimately chose LVMH as its partner, attracted not simply by scale but by an understanding of what makes individual maisons distinctive. “At the time, Mr. [Bernard] Arnault had formed a partnership with Prada, but Prada exited after a few years. LVMH has always emphasised the importance of the Fendi family history and roots.” Within the group, Silvia believes, there is an appreciation of why individuality matters. “The group has so many different brands in its portfolio. It understands even more clearly the importance of preserving and highlighting the distinctive codes of each maison.” For Fendi, those codes remain unmistakably Roman. “They begin with its Roman identity, and with our obsession with quality and exceptional craftsmanship,” Silvia says. They can be found in techniques such as Selleria, in the house’s extraordinary history with fur, and in the generations of artisans whose knowledge has allowed Fendi to keep pushing familiar materials into unfamiliar territory. The same instinct is visible in the way Silvia talks about India. Her fascination is not merely with the visual richness of the country. It is with the intelligence of its craft traditions — textiles, jewellery, ceremonial dress, embroidery and the rituals surrounding them. “The whole visual language of India is incredibly rich,” she says. India has enormous potential in the global luxury landscape, thanks to its strong cultural identity and extraordinary tradition of craftsmanship, she adds. Its ability to combine heritage and creativity, she believes, gives it “a very distinctive position in the world of luxury.” With a new generation increasingly interested in individuality, authenticity and an understanding of how things are made, India has an opportunity to define its own interpretation of luxury. “India does not need to imitate anyone else,” she says, pointing to its rich visual and cultural language of textiles, embroidery, jewellery and traditional dress. For her, preserving these traditions is equally important, as heritage should not belong only to the past but remain “a powerful source of creativity for the future.” India’s role, she believes, is not simply to become a larger luxury market, but to contribute its own ideas, craftsmanship and definition of what luxury can mean today. Having worked with exceptional Indian embroidery ateliers, she has seen that craftsmanship up close. Hence, there is something disarming about her admission that whenever she comes to India, she has “this desire to wear a sari... wearing one is a genuine dream of mine.” Perhaps that is why the sari makes such perfect sense to her. Like Fendi, it can be stripped back or elaborated, made traditional or contemporary, restrained or extravagant. The essential form remains, while the possibilities seem endless. For Silvia, that is what good design does. The challenge is to move forward without losing the thing that made the house worth preserving in the first place. “The challenge has always been to evolve while preserving the essence of what makes Fendi… Fendi.” That balance also shapes her understanding of fashion itself. For Silvia, creativity and commerce are not opposing forces. Fashion is art, but it is art that has to leave the gallery. “It is meant to be worn and lived in the real world. That is precisely what makes fashion so exciting. There is an incredible sense of satisfaction in seeing something you have imagined actually become part of someone’s life. Otherwise, we would simply be artists creating beautiful paintings or extraordinary sculptures made of fabric, but they would remain sculptures.” She sharpens the point further. “Fashion is different. Fashion does not belong in museums; it belongs on the street. I think one of the greatest compliments a designer can receive is to see a woman you admire wearing one of your creations walking down the street, stopping at a traffic light, getting into her car. That is when fashion truly comes alive.” There is, therefore, no discomfort for her in the word “commercial”. Fashion has to have a life beyond the runway. Perhaps it is time to move beyond the word “luxury”, she suggests, as the term has become too closely associated with price and value. “I would rather talk about quality fashion,” she says, defining quality through materials, craftsmanship, care, and ethics. After years of fast fashion, she believes the industry should embrace “slow fashion” and its philosophy of “buy less, but buy better.” This also means placing greater emphasis on creative and production processes, heritage techniques, and pieces designed to endure, rather than an endless cycle of newness. At Fendi, she points to enduring pieces such as a particular trench coat, shoe or bag that have remained part of the maison’s vocabulary for years. “That, to me, is quality fashion: creating pieces with enough substance and identity to become part of people’s lives over time.” Fashion is also a kind of barometer of society, she says. “Through fashion, you can understand so much about a particular moment in history, about how people live, think and change. It is a language, almost a universal one. So, for me, the balance is not about choosing between creativity and commerce. The real challenge is to use creativity to create something that people genuinely want to live with.” It is perhaps here that India and Fendi meet most naturally. In the sari, Silvia sees a garment that is essential, but never static. In Indian craftsmanship, she sees tradition kept alive through skill. And in the ability of both to absorb new ideas without surrendering their identity, she sees something close to the philosophy that has carried Fendi from a small Roman boutique to one of the world’s greatest luxury maisons. For someone whose life has been so deeply intertwined with the past, the most revealing thing about Silvia Venturini Fendi may be that she remains more interested in what comes next. At the heart of one of the world’s great luxury houses, what still excites you? “Curiosity,” pat comes the reply. “More than anything, I think I look at the future with an enormous sense of curiosity.” “Today, I wake up in the morning and create my own days. I am open to new experiences and to whatever life may put in front of me. For years, I was often asked in interviews what I would have done if I had not gone into fashion. For the first time, I feel that I actually have the time to find out. And perhaps that is what excites me most right now: the possibility of discovering what comes next!”

Luxury Special: How Silvia Venturini Fendi is keeping the brand relevant

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