Milan fashion week: Fendi makes mischief with digital motifs

http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2013/sep/19/milan-fashion-week-fendi-mischief-digital-motifs

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Milan has always been upfront about its preference for the business side of fashion. But there's a shift in mood, recognising that a more cultural point of view isn't a sign the city is going soft and, in fact, makes business sense.

Take Fendi. The cultural heart beating behind the label is increasingly on its sleeve, in a bid to draw in customers. An exhibition called Making Dreams: Fendi and the Cinema opens in a disused Milan cinema this week and tells the story of Fendi's association with cinema from the seventies until now. It follows a photography project earlier this year in which artistic director Karl Lagerfeld documented the fountains of Rome in the hope of restoring them.

Thursday's Fendi show, though, was more about the digitally-obsessed now. With hyperlinks, blogs, and even the design software Dreamweaver mentioned in the show notes, Lagerfeld was in a mischievous mood. "I love to use in a funny way words from the visual web communication world," he said.

The collection reflected that – layers of orange and pink organza were cut to resemble the different pages open in a web browser, while one leather skirt had a design like circuit boards. Even Apple users' bete noire, the wheel of death, was translated into a pattern of swirling circles. This being Fendi, there was still a lot of luxe. Fur pieces were dropped in – a long coat, and dresses from shaved mink. The ear cuffs with sprigs of fur were designed by jeweller Delfina Delettrez Fendi, a fourth generation member of the Fendi family.

Ealier, Maxmara was the first show of the day. With the majority of the collection in a palette that moved from beige to ecru and stone, it was the shapes that drew the eye. A neat combination of three-quarter-length duster coat, over-the-knee pencil skirt and simple camisole was a no-brainer formula for spring, while cool diversion came from an elegant stone-washed print on denim – not to mention a soundtrack dominated by New York early-eighties no wave group ESG. A brief flurry of colour at the end of the show still kept the commercial spin – models each carried two bags to make sure photographers got a double whammy of product for every shot.

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