ater has been an occasional
creative motif at Fendi since 1977, when it
commissioned the short ilm Histoire d’Eau to
launch its debut ready-to-wear collection for
women. The irst ilm made speciically for a
fashion brand, it followed the adventures of
young American actress Suzy Dyson in Rome,
drawing a connection between her exquisitely
crafted outits and the splendour of Rome’s
fountains and architectural icons. Four
decades on, Fendi picks up this theme once
again with rising Dutch design star Sabine
Marcelis, who has created an installation
for Design Miami exploring the trance-
inducing beauty of water in motion.
‘Water is such an interesting material
because of its changing shape and appearance,’
says Marcelis, whose mastery of glass and
resin brought her into the spotlight. ‘It’s
very undervalued and I think it’s nice toshowcase its beauty in a luxurious manner.’
Her new exhibition, ‘The Shapes of Water’,
will mark the tenth anniversary of Fendi’s
collaboration with the design fair.
Women designers remain something of
a rarity in the ield of high design, but Fendi
has used Design Miami as a platform to work
with creatives such as Maria Pergay (W*177),
Cristina Celestino (W*213) and Chiara
Andreatti (W*225). ‘Over these ten years,
I have noticed that women designers pay
more attention to the context while men
focus on the one-of-a-kind piece,’ says Silvia
Venturini Fendi, doyenne of the Roman
house. ‘We loved Sabine’s approach to special
materials and her use of colour to highlight
the shapes of her design,’ she continues.
‘Her projects are visually very strong. We
wanted to do something diferent this year,
and she seemed a perfect choice.’Marcelis began work on her commission with
a visit to Fendi’s HQ in the Eternal City.
‘I realised how Fendi is profoundly embedded
in Rome,’ she says. In 2013, the fashion house
set up the Fendi for Fountains initiative and
restored the Trevi Fountain and several other
water features as part of its commitment to
culture. Using water as a material, Marcelis
has now created ten cast-resin fountains,
each of which represents a Fendi icon.
‘I started experimenting with resin at
Design Academy Eindhoven. It has this
beautiful interaction with light; it can be
completely opaque or transparent,’ says
Marcelis. ‘It’s also liquid, so you can put it in
crazy moulds to have exactly the shape you
want.’ Each of her fountains is grounded on
a plinth of travertine, the same stone found
at Fendi’s HQ (W*201), and a fundamental
element of Roman architecture.
Marcelis wanted to bring something
diferent and unexpected to the table. The
results are poetic yet playful – two of her
fountains incorporate Fendi’s famous
FF logo, created in 1965 by Karl Lagerfeld,
while the entrance to the exhibition will
feature a fountain shaped like Fendi’s iconic
‘Peekaboo’ bag (which also celebrates its
tenth anniversary this year) cast out of resin
and sitting in a shallow pool of water.
The closed layout of the exhibition ilters
out the noise of the fairground to allow
visitors to listen to the water. Some of the
fountains are really quiet; others are louder.
The designer has choreographed them so
that as one walks through the space, these
diferences are noticeable, giving the
installation both visual and acoustic qualities.
The serene simplicity of the fountains is
deceptive; a complex mechanism provides
the magic unseen. ‘You shouldn’t know what
is hiding underneath the plinth, and that
it’s been programmed by three diferent
people. You should only see how the water
lows and hear its sound,’ says Marcelis.
Beyond the Fendi commission, Marcelis
is working on the interiors of a residential
building in Moscow designed by MVRDV –
her irst project on such a scale. She is also
developing new designs with a metal
manufacturing technique that the studio has
been testing for a while. ‘I often worry that
people just think of me as a resin and glass
person,’ she says. ‘So I’m constantly working
with factories and specialists to deine new
ways of manufacturing materials.’ ∂
Sabine Marcelis’ ‘The Shapes of Water’ is at Design
Miami, 5–9 December 2018, sabinemarcelis.com;
fendi.com; designmiami.comW
MARCELIS’ FOUNTAINS ARE
INSPIRED BY, FROM LEFT,
FENDI’S HQ, THE PALAZZO
DELLA CIVILTÀ ITALIANA;
ITS SKILLED FUR TAILORING;
THE LEATHER STITCHING
OF ITS SELLERIA LINE;
A LABYRINTH; THE COLOURS
OF A ROMAN SUNSET070 ∑
Design