For Fendi Couture Autumn/Winter 2022, Kim Jones was inspired by fragments of different cities, reverberating throughout the collection like trinkets from abroad. The Artistic Director and the craftspeople of the Fendi ateliers approached the collection as a palimpsest, with fragments of the past making up the present, and moving subtly into the future.
“This season, I wanted to step away from Rome, or at least I wanted to place Rome in a global context,” said Jones in the show notes of the collection. “In this collection, we are looking at fragments of different cities, namely Kyoto, Paris and Rome. The fragmentary nature of things is echoed throughout the collection, like snatches of memory or the impression of things past, present and future.”
From this, we are transported to Kyoto, the cultural capital of Japan, with pieces of kimono fabric form the 18th century found and peppered through the couture collection. Kata Yuzen, a hand-printing and painting technique that has remained unchanged for hundreds of years, is employed for these fabrications, made in Kyoto’s traditional silk panels; they are slices, asymmetrically reformed and seen on the runway in floor-length dress silhouettes. Cascading embroideries abound, particularly in the final tulle gowns of Fendi Couture Autumn/Winter 2022.
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Throughout the collection there are parallels drawn between East and West, masculine and feminine, with the juxtapositions examined by Jones through the garments designed. Kata Yuzen dresses find their continental counterpart in the glittering crystal cages reflecting the architectural spirit of Paris through their construction, yet framing the body through their design.
What makes Fendi itself is the employment of diverse materials to curate a cohesive couture collection. The french art deco ornament in the flou is met by and italian take on the tailleur in the Vicuna leather and fur works, with masculine codes of tailoring found in the Vicuna fabric suiting. Japanese fabrics are used as linings and quiltings in suiting alongside serving as the underpinning of dresses. At the crux of the collection are the craftspeople of the Fendi ateliers, and their supreme skills are on display in the intarsia construction of shaved mink suiting, a staple of the House.
