It can be difficult to manage to find a connection between fashion and cinema while being immersed in an interior design and furniture fair, but Italian fashion house Fendi just provided me with a wonderful excuse to indulge in my fashionably cinematic obsessions thanks to art project Design Vertigo, launched in collaboration with Design Miami/Basel.
Design Vertigo (open to the public from 2 to 7pm until 18th April at the Spazio Fendi, Via Sciesa 3, Milan) is a sort of development of two previous events, Craft Punk and Stereo Craft and features four different installations. You can read further about the event in an article I wrote for Dazed Digital.
So where's the cinema connection? Well, the installation created for Design Vertigo by British artist Graham Hudson - entitled “An insignificant extension in space and a considerable extension in time” - features a two storey scaffolding structure inspired by theatre balconies that incorporates Fendi bags and is populated by dummies clad in Fendi furs.
As Design Miami Director explained me in the Dazed interview, the pieces were selected by Hudson and herself from the Fendi archives.
Some of the furs appeared on the big screen and were worn by famous actresses such as Gwyneth Paltrow (in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums) and Madonna.
The Fendi fashion house always had some strong links with cinema and throughout the decades provided fur coats, jackets and accessories for many different films, collaborating with very famous directors.
In 1985 the Fendi sisters provided for Liliana Cavani’s The Berlin Affair (featuring costumes by Alberto Verso and Jusaburo Tsujimura) a 40s style mink fur coat that incorporated thin leather strips.
What always made me jealous about the Fendi sisters was that they worked with costume designer Piero Tosi and tailor Umberto Tirelli, two of the most talented artists in the history of Italian cinema.
Tosi and Tirelli chose, together with Silvana Mangano, a Fendi wardrobe for the main character in Luchino Visconti’s Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974) after seeing a Fendi catwalk show.
Some pieces were made by the fashion house exclusively for the film, in particular a cropped astrakhan jacket designed by Tosi and shaped on the actress’ body (a piece that resurfaced in some of the designs for Fendi's A/W 2010 collection).
In the film there were also further pieces picked from a Fendi collection like a silk dressing gown with sable lining.
Being Visconti totally obsessed with the costumes, the director asked the Fendi sisters to be particularly precise with the belt of a trench coat: according to Visconti, an entire camera shot would depend from that belt that had to cinch the waist of the main actress in a beautiful way.
The legend goes that the Fendi sisters employed twenty sable skins to make the infamous belt but the final effect Visconti wanted was achieved.
The fashion house also worked with Visconti on L’innocente (1976), creating a brown mole piece in collaboration with Tirelli.
A section of the 1985 Fendi-Karl Lagerfeld exhibition in Rome was dedicated entirely to cinema and included pieces from Vincente Minnelli’s Nina (1976), Mauro Bolognini’s Lady of the Camelias (1981), Franco Zeffirelli's Traviata (1983) and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
Many years have passed and more collaborations were added to Fendi’s portfolio. Fur fans who would like to explore the Fendi connections with cinema may want to check out the designs appearing in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part III (1990), Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), Alan Parker’s Evita (1997), Giuseppe Tornatore’s La leggenda del pianista sull'oceano (1998), Harold Ramis' Bedazzled (2000), Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001),Lee Tamahori’s Die another Day (2002), Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale (2002), Pitof’s Catwoman (2004), Benoît Jacquot's Princesse Marie (2004), David Frankel's The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Michael Davis' Shoot Em Up (2007) and Peter Webber's Hannibal Rising (2007).
Though supplying furs, clothes and accessories for films remains the house's main connections with cinema, in more recent years Fendi has also been involved in film production, through First Sun, founded by Silvia Venturini Fendi.
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