“We Share the Same Language”—Silvia Venturini Fendi on the Intersections Between Fashion and Furniture Design

Silvia Venturini Fendi sighs. “Ever since we have been collaborating with Design Miami someone asks me every year, ‘What is the difference between fashion and design?’ And I always say the same: I don’t think there is a very big difference. I find that we both share the same language, especially when it comes to creativity. Both have something to do with functions and response to functions.”

Venturini Fendi is speaking on the eve of this year’s Design Miami, which was launched in 2005 and whose 2022 edition opens today. The house her Roman forebears founded in 1925 first partnered with the Florida fair in 2008 and has continued to do so every year since, presenting a smorgasbord of symposiums, installations, and group shows. This year the Fendi booth is occupied by Triclinium, a fascinating group of furniture pieces by the Austrian artist Lukas Gschwandtner.

As the title suggests, the installation is centered around the Ancient Roman arrangement of a group of three couches upon which its citizens would eat and socialize. Gschwandtner’s formation of chaise longues are upholstered in canvas that is sculpted to bear the shadow of reclining human forms and echo the silhouettes of painted figures in works of art. 

“I like the idea that even the body can become a design object according to the position you take,” says Venturini Fendi. “At Fendi we are very attracted to leaving a human print on the objects, and that was very much the case with this project. This is what makes it more than a three dimensional project.” Echoing that is a Gschwandtner-conceived edition of the Peekaboo bag made up of a plaster cast of its interior, a piece that echoes the work of Rachel Whiteread on a far more intimate scale. 

That fourth dimension of human interaction and imprint is something Fendi rightly observes is in rich supply in Miami. Since the founding of Art Basel here 20 years ago and then Design Miami, she says: “We’ve witnessed a change over the entire city. It’s beautiful to see how creativity can positively interfere with the everyday. Creativity helped change the perception of this place, and enticed people to move here from New York and all over the world, because suddenly this was where the action is. And it all happened in relatively a short space of time—when we first started coming in 2008 it’s funny to think that the Design District was not even here.”

Later this week, Fendi will open a new Fendi Casa store in the global luxury hub that is the new Miami, a retail decision which she says was very easy to make. “Now, here in Miami, we have art, fashion, design, clever people, and real life, all intersecting. This is a city that has been able to react, adapt, and take advantage of something that was happening within it in order to reshape itself and evolve.”