The primary outfit in Fendi’s newest luxurious menswear line-up was showcased on Saturday in a music video-style movie streamed from a digital-only Milan fashion week. It starred the padded olive silk internal lining of a coat – “the softest half”, mentioned Silvia Fendi – with the sensible, structured high layer eliminated.
“That is therapeutic vogue,” defined Fendi, the boys’s and equipment inventive director of the model based by her grandparents 96 years in the past, talking through Zoom from her Milan studio. “It’s unimaginable to speak about vogue and to not speak about what’s taking place on the planet proper now. It modifications the garments and it modifications the best way they’re offered.”
When Italian lockdown dominated out a stay viewers, Fendi pivoted to a quick six-minute presentation to carry consideration on-line. “With a digital present, you’re serious about somebody who’s perhaps watching it on their cellphone whereas consuming lunch,” mentioned Fendi. Cameras lower speedily between fashions as they stride via alleyways of strobing neon lights, with a dancefloor-meets-arthouse soundtrack conserving vitality ranges excessive.
A vogue business hanging on by its fingernails after an annus horribilis now faces the prospect that 2021 could also be no much less disrupted than 2020. Till final February, Fendi was squeezing 1,400 visitors into at her reveals. In September, she managed a scaled-back present, with the viewers lower by over 90% to simply 130 visitors, together with the Regular Folks actor Paul Mescal. Now the viewers is zero. Hopes of a return to one thing nearer to normality in early 2021 have been dashed.
The present catwalk season is ready to be pared again even additional. Final week, London fashion week introduced that it too will likely be a completely digital occasion.
There are few fits at Fendi this season, as a result of “males don’t want them a lot now”. As a substitute, there are dressing-gown fashion coats, an “outside pyjama” two-piece, and waterproof boots with a detachable gentle lining “which you retain on as slippers whenever you come inside I believed that might be one thing good to have now,” mentioned Fendi.
Fendi thinks her business has realized that “perhaps it isn’t essential to take so many flights”, however she believes the catwalk present will return, as “probably the most attention-grabbing solution to present garments. Style makes a lot extra sense whenever you put it in that context of human togetherness”.
