So, apparently Kim Jone, Silvia Venturini Fendi, and Donatella Versace get along so well, they decided to have a little extra fun during Milan Fashion Week and swap houses. Jones and Fendi designed 25 looks for Versace through the their lens, and Donatella did the same for Fendi through hers, which led to a fusion of prints and motifs and even their logos as each designer opened up their full archive to the other. And thus, Fendace was born. As Jones pointed out, neither Fendi nor Versace has designed for anyone else’s house before, and they’re not under the same corporate umbrella so it’s not just boardroom-created cross-promotion:
As Jones was hinting, the most notable recent comparable fashion ‘contamination,’ between Balenciaga and Gucci, was indeed a project comprising two parts of a greater corporate whole. The most committed contaminator in fashion, meanwhile, is probably Moncler through its Genius project: however in this it acts more as curator more than co-creator. This was something both more radical and more daringly democratic: a meeting of three disparate design minds, all at the highest echelons of fashion, and all acting with an in-this-business all-too-rare creative humility in allowing one another free rein to reinterpret each other’s IP. It also had a heritage house logic to it, in that Gianni Versace and Karl Lagerfeld were both extremely friendly rivals.
Herein, the first 25 are Fendi-for-Versace, and then the next 25 are Donatella’s work. I THINK that the Fendi-designed stuff is more interesting? It’s such a cool extra-credit assignment to give themselves (when they already both sent down collections of their own!), and honestly, it’s something that would be really cool to see in select doses more often. Which designers would you like to see tinkering with each other’s brands?
