This was the tension I wanted to capture.”
“And, I might add,” Silvia says, “he is not
just a farmer but a gentleman farmer.”
When you look at the line, you see more
than enough beiges and greens and browns
to go around. Each is combined with mate-
rial you’d expect to find in a farmhouse or
a greenhouse—denim, cotton, leather—but
also silk, suede, and cashmere, with the no-
ble elements put to use in clothing you might
wear to dig in the dirt, or string a line of
beans, or net a butterfly.
Yet not all is rustic, bucolic, and compost
heap. There are clothes you need when
you’re in town: light suits, croco-printed
loafers, silk shirts with African-inspired pat-
terns (designed by Luca), not to mention the
wood-handled umbrella, because any gen-
tleman farmer of standing isn’t paying so-
cial visits dressed in gardening boots.
THE FENDI-GUADAGNINO DUO MAKE FOR
an odd couple. Luca is an easy six feet tall,
and when you first see him next to the pe-
tite Silvia and her shock of white hair, you al-
most vibe a czarina and her Rasputinesque
counsel. But when you sit with them drink-
ing espressos as I did at Fendi headquarters,
high up in the hills overlooking Rome, they
remind you more of those older couples at
the end of When Harry Met Sally.. ., finishing
each other’s sentences because they know
each other so well.
“What I like about Luca,” Silvia says with
a smile, “is the great balance he has be-
tween his aesthetics and vision. Plus, he de-
livers things. I’m very fast, but I get bored
very easily. Luca, when he has an idea, he
can wait years, slowly crafting a story
around his vision.”
“Well, it’s like a screenplay, actually,”
Luca says. “If I’m designing something for
somebody, whether it be a house or a store
or a collection like this, I have to know what
the client really wants, who they are, and
what is their way of living. And then you
have to translate that into spaces or clothes.
Maybe it’s intuitive, but I don’t know how
else to do it.”
In a way, the screenplay for this collab
hearkens back to Call Me by Your Name, a
patient film set during a beastly Italian sum-
mer, with bike rides through lush orchards
and calls to the dinner table echoing inside
airy villas, delivering a sensuality and au-
daciousness that’s become rarer and rarer
in film nowadays, considering that most of what we see today is either an eight-episode
Netflix series or a Marvel franchise.
“I don’t agree,” counters Luca, “and I know my take probably goes against all the analysis,
but I do believe that cinema is always surprising. Take Joker, for example. It’s a movie that ex-
ists in the space of a character piece, the storytelling of the filmmaker, and by the perfor-
mance of his actor. There is no car chase. There are no explosions. There are no digital ef-
fects. Nothing. And yet it made one billion dollars. I remember when I was a kid and already
people were saying, ‘Cinema is dead. Cinema is dead.’ And yet here we are here, still talking
about it and making it and enjoying it. It’s like fashion, actually. Things come full circle.”
So, while we tend to assume that big data mapping each of our tastes has won, Italian de-
signers and filmmakers are still holding it down, huddling over bottles of Chianti late at night
in Roman trattorias, talking jewelry and cigarettes and marble staircases and visions of how
to mold them into something that stirs the soul.Shirt, trousers, sneakers ($790), belt ($420), and necklace ($690) by Fendi Men’s.
STYLING BY ALFONSO FERNÁNDEZ NAVASDirectors, Silvia learned, were
t hat only the finest tailor could appreciate.
just designers in another medium
. They too had an attention to det ail