Directors' Cut

Silvia Venturini Fendi is a designer. (At Fendi. Heard of it?) Luca Guadagnino is a film director. ( Call Me by Your Name. Seen it?) Together they’ve made this spring’s most inspired clothing collab.

- John von Sothen

When she was a child, Silvia Venturini Fendi (creative director at, um, Fendi) watched a lot of movies, but she didn’t go to the cinema. The cinema came to her.

“Every anniversary, every Christmas, every family gathering, we’d screen a movie at home, and I remember my cousins and I waiting impatiently for the man to arrive with the projector. They’d put up a white sheet against the wall and we’d watch Visconti’s The Leopard or Gone with the Wind or The Sound of Music. The boys, of course, wanted to see more action films, but I loved it. There were the dresses and the suits, and over and over again I’d sit and stare.”

It was during these nights that Silvia grasped the power of filmmaking, its dark magic, and liquid mystery, and, of course, its potential as a platform for fashion. Her grandparents Edoardo and Adele did, too. They’d founded Fendi in 1925 and, thanks to the shrewd hire of an up-and-coming designer named Karl Lagerfeld in 1965, transformed it from a nuts-and-bolts fur-and-leather-goods company into a major Roman maison. Soon the Fendis were providing costumes for some of cinema’s most iconic films, while forging friendships with the likes of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti.

Directors like these, Silvia learnt, were just designers in another medium. They too had taste and vision and an attention to detail that only the finest tailor could appreciate.