Fendi Haute Couture Spring 2023

There was a serenely silvery flow of Fendi haute couture for spring. “I want to do lightness because for me, couture always seems quite staid and heavy,” Kim Jones had said earlier. “I wanted a floatiness. Elegant but youthful.”

It’s his fifth season of establishing an identity for the Roman house, and it felt as if he’s into the flow of it now. Let it be said: when you’re out to create loyalty and cement relationships, there’s a virtue to not chopping and changing styles and themes with every season. Jones said this collection was “a continuation” of his fall couture, and a response to Fendi clients’ requests for evening dresses.

What he offered was a discreetly modernized redefinion of statuesque goddess-dressing: slim silhouettes, in pale evanescent colors, somehow reworked through the sensibility of the ’90 slip-dress.

Couture distinguishes itself from ready-to-wear when the specialisms of ateliers create textures and fabrics that are not at all what they seem. At Fendi, the heritage and know-how descends from its roots as an Italian leather and fur house. The passage of time obviously means that showing furs on a runway is out of the question. Jones gave a non-fur nod to the past in a couple of embroidered cross-body stoles; the rest of the trompe l’oeil expertise was concentrated on finessing leather to look and drape like fabric. Not that you’d ever know it, unless you were wearing it.

Images courtesy of Armando Grillo.