FENDI Couture Spring/Summer 2023

This season, Kim Jones and the craftspeople of the FENDI ateliers continue to approach the couture collection as an inner-world palimpsest, where iterations, transparencies and techniques of the past go to make up the present and move subtly into the future.

“This season, I wanted to concentrate on the techniques and craft of couture, with the lightness, fluidity and attitude of today,” says Kim Jones, FENDI Artistic Director of Couture and Womenswear. “It’s a celebration of the ateliers and the craftspeople who realise these garments, the intense work and emotional commitment to each piece that exists for both maker and wearer, and how the intimate traditions of the couture are both living and breathing. The collection is an inner world made into an external one – both figuratively and literally – with a sense of underwear becoming eveningwear.”

Purposeful flux and flexibility

Couture traditions are made both human and approachable, light with a sense of luminosity, lucidity and ease for the wearer. Eschewing ‘costume’ and embracing a softer, more yielding feeling of agency for the woman in the clothing, a mutability is sought and expressed. The flou is concentrated on and in the form of the dress, yet an idea of the ensemble is also revived in a new sense, with a notion of purposeful flux and flexibility replacing impenetrability. Winged sleeves are often detachable; lingerie is designed as part of a look, often in the same intensely embroidered and unexpected fabrications, even when invisible; coats mirror the intense embroidery of their matching dresses on the inside yet can be reversed; ‘apron’ wrap skirts can also be worn as stoles.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fendi

An artful ‘sprezzatura’

An artful ‘sprezzatura’ of done and undone permeates all: a nonchalance and purposeful imperfection to achieve more human perfection. This is clothing that is not just about being looked at but about being lived in.

Draping and tying on the body, the exploration of lace and its placement, the hand-pleating motifs, together with an elevation of exceptional knit, give a sense of the sculptural and organic while at the same time displaying virtuoso ‘sprezzatura’. Even utilitarian climbing carabiners are remade as luxury sculptural objects, to tether materials nonchalantly.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fendi

Cascading gowns and more…

An idea of done and undone, a machine world versus an organic one, making hard soft and vice versa comes together with the supreme skills of the FENDI ateliers in the motif of the metallic leather-lace. At times appearing like chainmail – particularly in the recurring gloves – exceptionally soft and malleable leather is handcrafted with both lace-like cut-outs and inset with lace intarsias for a passage of dresses with their matching ensemble underwear. In a similar vein, yarn in the form of the extraordinarily delicate Japanese mohair, Fuuga – the finest gauge to be found in the world – is worked on a frame and becomes the apotheosis of crochet in gossamer lightness more akin to lace in cascading gowns.

FENDI Couture SS23

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fendi

Photo Credit: Paolo Fichera/ Courtesy of Fendi

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fendi

Photo Credit: Paolo Fichera/ Courtesy of Fendi

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fendi

Photo by Paolo Fichera/Getty Images for Fendi

Celebrities and Influencers Who Attended

Celebrities Who Attended FENDI Couture SS 2023

Courtney Love – the legendary American musician, artist, writer and actress. (Photo by Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Fendi)

UK actress Milly Alcock, the breakout Gen Z star of HBO’s critically acclaimed “House of the Dragon”. (Photo by Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Fendi)

Emmy-nominated American Actress Kerry Washington. (Photo by Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Fendi)

Powerhouse acting Sarah Paulson multi-award-winner. (Photo by Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Fendi)

Top-tier model Shalom Harlow. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images for Fendi)

Top-tier model Amber Valletta. (Photo by Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Fendi)

Collaborator and friend of the House, British singer Rita Ora. (Photo by Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Fendi)

Palme d’Or winning French actress Adèle Exarchopoulos. (Photo by Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Fendi)

Italian star of “Diabolik,” Miriam Leone. (Photo by Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Fendi)

Rising star Emilia Jones – nominated for a BAFTA for her part in the Academy Award-winning film CODA. (Photo by Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Fendi)