A centennial celebration transforms Italian craft into a sculptural, multisensory salon conceived with artist Conie Vallese
Marking its 100th anniversary, Fendi presents “Fonderia Fendi”, an ambitious exploration of feminine strength, material mastery, and Italian artistry unveiled at Design Miami/ 2025. Conceived with Argentinian designer and artist Conie Vallese, the project revives the spirit of Italy’s influential role in the 1925 Decorative and Industrial Modern Arts exhibition while paying tribute to Karl Lagerfeld’s 1994 illustration Les Cinq Doigts d’une Main, which imagined the five Fendi sisters as a single creative force. Vallese extends that symbolism into a contemporary collective gesture, calling upon five storied Italian ateliers to craft one-of-a-kind works in bronze, ceramic, glass, carpet, and leather.
The installation takes shape as an intimate salotto — a pale, cocoon-like living room washed in soft light that illuminates Vallese’s organic silhouettes. Working closely with Fendi’s leather workshops, Fonderia Battaglia, Officine Saffi Lab, CC-Tapis, and the 13th-century Venetian glassmaker Barovier & Toso, Vallese transforms monumental materials into tactile expressions of romance and modernity. A Roman palette of rosy bronze, sorbetto yellow, and pale anice blue sets the tone, while textures—opaque glass with pastel iridescence, tufted carpet reliefs, glazed ceramic tiles—embrace the beauty of the imperfect. Lilies bloom across bronze benches, screens, sconces, and chairs, each traced with the embossed impression of Fendi’s signature Selleria stitch, blurring the boundary between industrial precision and the human hand.
Art Deco, Art Nouveau, and early Modernism echo throughout the collection, from ceramic cube tables glazed in soft tones and embossed with lilies or double-F monograms, to hand-blown opaque Murano vases adorned with sculpted floral motifs. A hand-carved wool rug by CC-Tapis extends Vallese’s fantasy garden into a textural landscape underfoot. The result is a 360-degree vision of a decadent Fendi salon—sensual, architectural, and steeped in craftsmanship.
Continuing a seven-year tradition, Vallese also reimagines the iconic Peekaboo bag by Silvia Venturini Fendi. The limited-edition design mirrors the installation’s palette and materiality, rendered as a reversible model in pale yellow and blue diagonal-striped calfskin with hand-sculpted ceramic details. Released exclusively in five numbered pieces at the Fendi boutique in the Miami Design District, the Peekaboo becomes a collectible extension of “Fonderia Fendi”—a wearable artifact of the House’s centennial year and its enduring dialogue between art, craft, and feminine imagination.
