FENDI Celebrates 100 Years with “Fonderia Fendi” by Conie Vallese

Marking its centennial year, FENDI unveils Fonderia Fendi, an ambitious collectible design presentation conceived by Argentinian designer and artist Conie Vallese for Design Miami/ 2025. The project stands as a poetic meditation on feminine strength, Italian craftsmanship, and the House’s enduring dialogue between fashion, art, and design—translated into a richly layered, immersive environment.

Conceived as both homage and contemporary reinterpretation, Fonderia Fendi draws inspiration from Italy’s historic contribution to the 1925 Decorative and Industrial Modern Arts exhibition in Paris. Vallese approaches the commission as a collective gesture, collaborating with five renowned Italian ateliers to produce singular works across bronze, ceramic, glass, carpet, and leather. The conceptual backbone nods to Karl Lagerfeld’s 1994 illustration Les Cinq Doigts d’une Main, which depicted the five Fendi sisters as one unified creative force—an idea Vallese reanimates through material collaboration and shared authorship.

The resulting collection comes to life through partnerships with FENDI’s own leather ateliers, Milan’s historic Fonderia Battaglia, ceramic innovators Officine Saffi Lab, carpet specialists CC-Tapis, and Murano glass masters Barovier & Toso. Together, they form a contemporary “foundry” of ideas where heritage techniques are shaped by hand into expressive, monumental forms.

At Design Miami/, Fonderia Fendi is staged as an intimate Roman salotto—a living room envisioned as a pale cocoon washed in soft, atmospheric light. Within this serene setting, Vallese’s organic creations unfold in a refined Roman palette of rosy bronze, FENDI’s signature sorbetto yellow, and pale anice blue. Imperfection is embraced as a virtue: opaque glass shimmers with pastel iridescence, tufted rugs reveal sculptural reliefs, and glazed ceramic tiles bear painterly textures that emphasize the human hand.

Floral symbolism runs throughout the collection, most notably through majestic lilies that bloom across a bronze bench, occasional chair, room divider, and illuminated wall sconce. Each piece is traced with an embossed impression of FENDI’s iconic Selleria stitch, subtly blurring the line between industrial process and artisanal gesture. References to the Roaring Twenties—when Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Modernism converged—surface in the sculptural silhouettes and decorative richness, while FENDI’s leather heritage grounds the designs. Upholstered in flat planes of cuoio Romano leather and finished with Selleria stitching, the furniture asserts a distinctly Roman sense of luxury.

Ceramic works introduce modular benches and cube tables clad in bespoke embossed tiles. Hand-sculpted lilies and orchids appear alongside double FF monogram motifs, glazed in soft, matte and satin finishes. Mouth-blown Murano glass vases echo the collection’s floral language, while a hand-carved wool rug by CC-Tapis extends Vallese’s vision across the floor, its tiled lily pattern framing the space as a fully realized, 360-degree FENDI salon.

Continuing a seven-year tradition, FENDI also invited Vallese to reinterpret the Peekaboo bag, originally designed by Silvia Venturini Fendi in 2008. Revealed at Design Miami/ and available at the FENDI boutique in Miami’s Design District, the limited-edition Peekaboo mirrors the collection’s tactile materiality and pastel palette. Reimagined as a reversible style in pale yellow and blue diagonal-striped calfskin, the bag is finished with hand-sculpted ceramic details and produced in an edition of just five pieces.

With Fonderia Fendi, the House celebrates 100 years not by looking backward, but by reaffirming its belief in craft as a living, evolving language. Through Vallese’s romantic yet grounded vision, FENDI transforms design into a space of intimacy, collaboration, and enduring beauty—where heritage is not preserved behind glass, but continuously reformed by hand.