October 18, 2022 |
When Delfina Delettrez Fendi was a little girl, she wasn’t allowed to wear pink. “It’s something my grandmother did with my mother and my mother did with me, and that I’m now doing with my children. It’s a way to prepare a new generation for a male-oriented world,” she explains. Being a Fendi, there’s a certain irony to her statement.
While her family’s fashion house has historically been fronted by men – from her great-grandfather Edoardo to Karl Lagerfeld and now Kim Jones – it has consistently been run by women. For nearly 100 years, they have embodied what it means to “be Fendi”. It’s why, when Jones was appointed Artistic Director of Womenswear in 2020, his first move was to make Delettrez his Artistic Director of Jewellery. As the fourth generation to carry on the Fendi legacy, she was already an accomplished jeweller with her own brand. By joining the family business, she secured the future of the Fendi bloodline within the LVMH-owned brand.
During preparations for the haute couture collection at Palais Brongniart in Paris in early July, Jones and his stylist Alister Mackie were fitting looks on models while Delettrez and her mother Silvia Venturini Fendi – Artistic Director of Menswear and Accessories – observed their every move from a grand desk at the end of the makeshift runway, flanked by Lady Amanda Harlech. The Fendi women weren’t only there in the capacity of their jobs, but as constant sounding boards for the brand’s genetics. “When we say, ‘Oh my god, this is so Fendi,’ it’s a chemical balance that makes you say that. I can’t explain it in a rational way. It’s something you can read in the collections, our everyday choices and our private homes,” says Delettrez the week after the show, on the phone from Rome. “I think it’s why Kim wanted me next to him, because I can sort of detect what that Fendi-ness is.”
At his side, Delettrez, 35, has become an advisor and a muse: a personification of what it means to be and look ‘Fendi’ in a contemporary and generational context. “I wear Fendi sunglasses. I see things through a Fendi lens. I always say that my mother is the Fendi archive and I am the walking archive. Kim looks at something and says, ‘Oh my god, this is so you.’ And I know that’s his way of saying, ‘This is so Fendi.’” Over the past two years, Delettrez hasn’t just infused Jones’ work with the ravishing gothically romantic and slightly industrial jewellery she creates for his collections, but has also provided inspiration through her personal style and choices. Shaped by her family’s culture and aesthetics, it’s a monumental look perhaps most easily described as Roman glamour: an architectural strictness founded in masculine codes and veiled in a darkly feminine romanticism with cinematic undertones, all empowered by Delettrez’s long mahogany hair, olive skin and chiselled Roman features.
“When I was little, I was always different to my classmates. I was like this little Wednesday, all dressed in black,” she says, referring to Christina Ricci’s goth-to-the-core daughter from The Addams Family. A product of a creative matriarchal upbringing, Delettrez understood the force of individuality. “I was always experimenting and finding my own way. I was also rebelling through my school uniform because it was kind of weird to me having to follow rules at school that I didn’t have to follow at home. I wanted to find my own voice and my own uniform.” That process started at home: “I was very free in experimenting. My mum would find me in her closet with a pair of scissors. I’ve destroyed many dresses. I was about to cut up her wedding dress and she stopped me,” she says, laughing, referring to the design Lagerfeld created for Venturini’s nuptials. “It was red so I had no idea it was a wedding dress.
”Delettrez’s understanding of style was shaped by a childhood spent in rare environments: “I love women who are surrounded by old-world mystery. In my memory, there’s always this Fendi client who used to come to the boutique when it had closed and ask for the most incredible pieces, extravagant ones, like a shaved panther fur. She was joined by her lover at night. This is Rome: the sacred and the profane. It was like living in a movie every day. So, I’m attracted by these eccentric women that are out of the ordinary. Women, who live their lives as if they were in a movie. They live in my imagination and in my childhood memories.” As a young adult, she developed a highly distinctive look shaped by the genetics of her family wardrobe and the character of her native Rome.
“I started wearing these uniforms when I started working, but my uniforms are like nuns’ clothes. For sure, I wanted to create subtle reactions. Walking down the street in Rome, people would be like, ‘But you’re so young and beautiful, are you sure you want to be a nun?’ And I play that game, even though I’m shy. I have fun with it. It’s like wearing one earring. Everyone goes, ‘You lost an earring!’” She was just 19 when she followed in the footsteps of her jeweller father, Bernard Delettrez, and founded her own jewellery brand. She named it Delfina Delettrez, leaving out the Fendi part of her surname from the eponym. “I kind of had to escape from the family to see if my passion was real. Because I really think that the worst nightmare would be living someone else’s dream. And this can be tricky when you belong to a family like this and feel like you want to continue,” she says.
“Jewellery was the only world that wasn’t touched by Fendi. It made me make peace with that and understand that I had something to say. I wanted to adapt the fashion rules I grew up with and apply them to a universe that wasn’t that exciting,” she says. What she means is that fine jewellery came with a pace much slower than what you find in ready-to-wear. “I was used to this fashion adrenaline: ‘I want this and I want it now!’ So, I naturally applied the fashion rules to the jewellery world and shook it up a bit.” Delettrez has carved out an idiosyncratic trademark within the jewellery world, in an expression rooted in the spirit of flora and fauna, a romantic take on geometric lines and a poetic conversation between the past, present and future. “I want to create small objects that are filled with fantasy. I want my brand to stay close to my vision.The more personal, the better,” she says. After 15 years, she still designs every piece herself.
When Jones hired her at Fendi, her work came full circle. “Finally, I feel complete. I can apply my personal vision and I also get to apply the Fendi codes I grew up with to my brand. And finally, I can interpret the logo, which I missed very much, because to me, it’s a kind of family crest. There’s a lot of meaning and sentiment behind those two letters. It’s like what I do in my everyday life: going into my mother’s closet and selecting clothes. It’s who I am.” One of her first moves at the house was to design a new double-F logo – the oval “O’Lock” – which has since been applied to everything from hardware to furniture. In July’s couture collection, Delettrez debuted her first haute joaillerie for Fendi: a Roman fountain and logo necklace in ‘Baguette-cut’ yellow diamonds that matched the house’s signature colour and figuratively nodded at its best-selling bag, the Baguette, originally designed by her mother.
In every way, joining Fendi seemed like an inevitable move for the fourth-generation heir to a company which may be owned by LVMH, but is still driven by the family spirit. Growing up, Delettrez was a natural part of family meetings. “No matter what age you were, you were always invited. This pushed and accelerated our creativity. We were never a family that was interested in the jet-set. We were really hard workers. They sacrificed their life in a beautiful way. They were loving what they were doing. But it was a life devoted to the brand. I remember looking at them preparing in the evening. I would say, ‘Where are you going?’ They’d say, ‘Oh, we’re going back to the office…’ With everything that my grandmother and great-grandmother had accomplished, they would still drive this old, broken Fiat 500,” she says, laughing. “It’s living your life in a whispered luxury. We all have that.
”Until his death in 2019, Lagerfeld was a constant presence in her life. “I was able to know Karl from a different angle. I was able to see his fragilities and strengths. It made us look at him in a very human way, also seeing his sweetness, like when I was a kid and he’d hold me in his arms,” she says. “For the last years of his life, he was very much like a grandfather, in his own way, also towards my kids. He always gave them attention. He wanted me to send him pictures of the day of the births.” Delettrez had her daughter – now 15 – in 2007, the same year she founded her label, and gave birth to twin boys in 2018 with her partner, the artist Nico Vascellari. In Jones, she recognises certain parallels with Lagerfeld. “It’s a dynamic that works because it’s a story that continues. There are many similarities between Kim and Karl, in their mentalities, their irony. All the people on his team are his long-time friends,” she says. “I think one is the family that you choose and one is the family that you have, and he really has this sense of family.”
FENDI: THE ULTIMATE MUSE
Photographer TIERNEY GEARON
Fashion Editor SOPHIA NEOPHITOU
Text ANDERS CHRISTIAN MADSEN
Talent DELFINA DELETTREZ FENDI, Fendi’s Artistic Director of Jewellery
Hair ALESSANDRO ROCCHI at Simone Belli
Make-up GIOVANNI PIRRI at Simone Belli
Production ZAC APOSTOLOU
Location PALAZZO DELLA CIVILTA ITALIANA
Special thanks to the FENDI family
