Fendi shows how to do comfort dressing without resorting to jogging bottoms
Ever since the 1960s and the discarding of girdles, fashion has been in a constant dialogue with comfort. Sometimes the conversation has been tetchy. In the '90s when shell suits – a primitive, nylon forerunner of today’s nifty trackie combos – became popular, the backlash in fashion circles reminded me of a mother safeguarding her young. “Comfort! It’s so over-rated. What about elegance?” said Bella Freud at the time. It’s no coincidence that the corset was revived a year or two later.
In many ways, the battle was artificial. It’s not as if women were compelled to wear waist cinchers, heels, Wonderbras or any of the other discomforting, body transforming items that regularly stormed in and out of fashion. One of the beneficial legacies of the '60s was the end of mono-fashion.
By the mid to late 70s you could be a prairie girl, a punk or a Bowie acolyte. The choices have only proliferated as the decades moved on. Fashion’s purpose has been less about providing one template for everyone and more about providing individuals with the tools to inhabit their mood of the moment.
Yet watching Silvia Fendi’s spring/summer 2021 show on my computer in London (the show was live streamed, but there was also a small audience in attendance in Milan) you’d be forgiven for thinking that comfort, and how to make it mesh with a refined aesthetic, is now the single most salient creative issue for designers.
The peacock elements of fashion in which everything was about external display have, for the moment, been quietly relegated to the wardrobe marked Embarrassing Memories. Instead the focus is on the personal relationship the wearer has with their clothes. How do you create a sense of ease and not make it about a pair of jogging pants and a fleece?
In Fendi’s case the solution is to take a 1940s silhouette – strong shoulders, peplums, brimmed hats, trench coats and capes – and recreate it in lighweight, sheer fabrics with plenty of slashes, vents and wide sleeves. As the models – men and women in interchangeable tailoring and coats – paced along the catwalk in high neon pink or yellow heels, the effect became more and more dream-like, aided by some distorting camera angles.
Was that really Karen Elson, liberated from the US travel ban (it was). Ashley Graham ? (Ditto). If you have all your papers in order, you can travel for work. White curtains fluttered along the length while a view of French windows opening onto silhouetted trees and birds in flight (lucky them) were projected onto them. This, Silvia Fendi said via Zoom before the show “is the view I looked out onto every day from my house in Rome during lockdown”.
Enclosed there for months with her family, she reflected on her ancestors, and the clothes she’d worn in the past, “and the way my daughter wears some of my old dresses which still look completely contemporary. That got me thinking bout how to marry the past and the future and making things as sustainable as possible.”
Some of the most sustainable fabrics turn out to be old-school linens and broderie anglaise. She also invited craftspeople from each of Italy’s 21 regions to reinterpret the famous Fendi Baguette bag. From Abruzzo comes a white lace one, dipped in sugar water to stiffen it (the ultimate arm candy). From the Marche, a Baguette made from woven willow strands. “This was an art that was in danger of extinction,” says Fendi, “but now they’re planting willow trees so we can make these bags”.
It was an interesting approach, a digital audience watched alongside 130 guests in Milan, live music, albeit of the synthesised kind. The emphasis was on mood rather than detail. Guests were sent their invitations with a linen envelope of old photographs of Fendi’s ancestors. (The thick, embossed invitation is one tradition Italians seem loathe to give up on, even in a digital era).
In some ways I was most interested to see what Silvia Fendi, one of the most powerful women in fashion whose working life has been upended, was wearing. Slim navy trousers, an oversized shirt jacket, flat shoes, and magnolia blond cropped hair. “Did I stay in pyjamas all day during lockdown? Absolutely not”.
Next season Kim Jones, Dior’s menswear designer takes over at Fendi’s womenswear. On the basis of this mixed gender show, will his clothes also be tilted towards a man’s wardrobe ? Will he collaborate with Silvia Fendi or replace her? “I can’t tell you yet," she laughed. “It’s all quite open. Ask me again in a few months”.
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