Fendi has immediately unveiled its newly expanded and renovated girls’s prepared-to-put on boutique inside Harrods, as a daring assertion of confidence in London’s luxurious market – and maybe a symbolic prelude to its subsequent inventive chapter underneath Maria Grazia Chiuri.
The Italian home has elevated its Harrods footprint by 50 sq. metres, bringing the full to 175 sqm, reworking the house into an immersive reflection of its Roman roots: half temple, half atelier, half fashionable gallery.
The design, divided into three rooms, reinterprets the model’s native Rome by means of architectural language: Palladiana flooring in Travertino Ascoli and Giallo Valencia marble, Calce Romana partitions and columnar particulars that nod to town’s historical structure. A VIP Salon will also be accessed by way of a disguised passageway from the boutique’s exterior.
Inside, the centrepiece is a monumental ceramic paintings by Milan-based designer Roberto Sironi, which addsa a dose of mid-century modernism into Fendi’s Rome.
But this enlargement is about greater than marble and ceramics. It’s arriving at a pivotal second for Fendi, following the announcement that Maria Grazia Chiuri will be a part of the home as Creative Director. Chiuri’s appointment got here six months after her departure from Dior, the place she served as Womenswear Creative Director and have become the primary lady to steer the model’s design group.
This is a full-circle second for the designer. Chiuri’s profession at Fendi, from 1989 to 1999, included ten years in equipment design, the place she notably helped form the home’s signature Baguette bag.
In this context, the new Harrods boutique looks like each a bodily and symbolic transition: an area constructed to deal with the following chapter of Fendi femininity. Chiuri’s arrival alerts a possible shift in tone, from Kim Jones’s architectural sensuality and tailoring in direction of one thing extra romantic and female.
Fendi’s London enlargement additionally speaks to the model’s ongoing international technique underneath Chairman and CEO Serge Brunschwig and the LVMH group as they got down to deal with flagship experiences. Harrods and its grandure affords a becoming stage for this evolution.
The subsequent chapter of Fendi begins right here, underneath the gilded lights of Harrods, on one of the vital coveted flooring in London, with historical past and a touch of change within the air.