Silvia Venturini Fendi's Last Collection With Karl Lagerfeld

At fendi’s reshow of its FW’19 collections in shanghai, the late karl lagerfeld is omnipresent. Silvia Venturini Fendi tells elle, through the season’s creations.

- Andrea Sim

The granddaughter of Fendi’s founders, Silvia Venturini Fendi was just five years old when she first encountered Karl Lagerfeld. His appointment as the Italian brand’s creative director in 1965, then a fur and leather goods shop, had set the course for their paths to cross. She recalls hanging around Lagerfeld when he worked, and she eventually grew to work alongside him after taking up the role of creative director for menswear, and the duty of whipping up accessories — such as the now two-time It bag, the Baguette — for his womenswear collections.

Venturini Fendi and Lagerfeld’s alliance would last the rest of his lifetime, because once he set foot in Fendi, he never left. It is now the longest collaboration between a fashion house and a designer, in which the late visionary helped parlay the brand from a single shopfront in Rome, into the global, luxury juggernaut it is today.

This sheer longevity of his is just one reason why in speaking with Venturini Fendi before the FW’19 reshow in Shanghai, Lagerfeld appears to be inextricable. No, omnipresent, as even just his swan song of a collection, FW’19, is testament to his enduring creative influence. His penchant for contrasts comes in the soft silhouettes that play up against strong, pagoda shoulders, and that decades-long love affair with crisp, high-collar shirts are on display alongside a self-designed FF monogram from 1981 (known as the Karligraphy logo). His presence in the menswear collection is palpable given that he was Venturini Fendi’s guest artist and style inspiration this season, with the notes and sketches he’d sent her over the years collaged and presented as a print. Behind closed doors, it’s apparent too that he lives on, in memories; as the tenacious mentor who welcomed her from the moment they met, and gave her advice (over the phone) up till the day before he passed on.