Friends of Fendi’s collection in collaboration with Stefano Pilati, Artistic Director, greatly admired by Kim Jones and Silvia Venturini Fendi. The Milan/Rome duality inspires the collection, where the bourgeois chic of Milan – the city of origin of Pilati – meets the freedom of Rome – the city of origin of FENDI: it is the meeting of two worlds. Strict bourgeois sensuality is associated with aristocratic carefreeness. Stefano Pilati approaches the classics of silhouette, materiality and tastes rigorously and playfully in the quintessence of the Roman house.
Stefano Pilati Is The First Guest Designer Of Friends Of Fendi
Stefano Pilati acquired his inspiration from the androgynous and ambiguous air of Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter (1974), Florinda Bolkan’s uninhibited allure in A Common Sense of Modesty (1976); and the bourgeois elegance of the tormented Monica Vitti in Red Desert (1964). These cinematic masterpieces present a wealth of aesthetics beyond genres and binary divisions, reflected in Stefano Pilati’s capsule collection for Fendi.
The Milanese designer has a three-decade-strong career in fashion, spanning from Armani to Yves Saint Laurent, Prada to Ermenegildo Zegna. It is the first special guest of Friends of Fendi, a collection of 42 looks to be mixed freely beyond genres and categories, inaugurated by Kim Jones, Fendi’s creative director of womenswear, and Silvia Venturini Fendi.
Friends of FENDI”: The Stefano Pilati Collaboration Drops
“I am a great admirer of Stefano’s work and consider him a source of inspiration for what I do. He is a friend and a designer who perfectly embodies the contemporary zeitgeist; he looks to the future, asking questions and providing solutions,” explains Jones. “With his label Random Identities, Stefano has proposed a way of dressing and undressing that I have always found very intriguing – I wear his clothes myself.” Pilati’s mission?
“Kim and Silvia offered me an attractive challenge: to explore the Fendi world through my lens, with complete carte blanche,” he declares.
“We started from these assumptions and ‘Fendomised’ them,” Jones adds. “Fusing that easy and subversive chic, which has always been part of Fendi’s codes, with a new approach far from any stereotype. In addition to a new ideological approach, it is an ideal fusion between the imagery of two cities. The Milanese one – sober and quiet – of Pilati, and the typically Roman one of the label with the double F.”
If the colours are those of the Eternal City, the silhouette commemorates the rigour and construction of men’s tailoring and the softness and curves of haute couture. Think Jazz Age flapper petticoats, transparent blouses, the classic LBD, precisely honed blazers and trousers with boxer short details, inspired by what Pilati terms “certain details of hip-hop clothing”. The brand’s signature Baguette and Peekaboo bags have also been reinterpreted. Likewise, its iconic double F logo is reimagined as a tactile pattern on shirts and overcoats.
The ’20s is the decade to which Pilati’s heart belongs. This was the time when Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss poet and photographer who was described by her portrait photographer Marianne Breslauer as “a strange mixture of man and woman, not a living being but a work of art”, had become a style icon to thousands of girls. It was also the era of The Bachelor Girl (1922), a scandalous bestseller by Victor Margueritte, enthusiastically read by scores of women fascinated by the adventures of Monique Lerbier, an upper-middle-class girl and student at the Sorbonne who steals not only the jacket and tie from men but also the trousers.
“The 1920s are the years of questions about gender, the spread of psychoanalysis, the Bauhaus,” says Pilati. “At that time, fashion was at the service of customs. Clothing then reflected a social discourse. Today, although this is missing, I wanted to reread its imagery. Reconnecting in some ways to the vision of Random Identities, I wanted to translate the attitudes of that extraordinary historical moment into a study of forms of low lives and details that allude to a new freedom.”
Hot or Not? We are fans of Stefano Pilati since the early years of our magazine. Now, I will wait to see which celebrities will wear it first. What will you have your eyes on?
The collection will be available in stores from October 26.
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