Delfina Delettrez Fendi designs Fendi pearls

It’s all about Fendi pearls. Presented during Milan fashion week this past weekend in a show masterminded by Italian artist Nico Vascellari, with her AW22 menswear collection Silvia Venturini Fendi plays with traditional codes of formal dress.

Collage-like, the designer mixes hounds’ tooth fabrics, woven tweeds and cable knits. There are glossy satin trims remembered from evening wear tuxedos, deep-pile shearling coats (some are intarsia-worked) and diaphanous silk. The latter is used in a line of socks that hit below the knee and are detailed with the Roman maison’s O’Lock symbol.

Fendi’s signature padlock motif can be spotted throughout, including in a selection of single earrings and placed at the centre of pearl necklaces. Dreamt up by Delfina Delettrez Fendi, the collection’s jewellery makes for a sparkling focal point. And pearls are a main ingredient.  “The pearl, it comes as it is. It’s beautiful as it is,” Delettrez Fendi told me last summer. “You don’t need to cut it, or polish it. It looks so contemporary.” Here then, Fendi pearl colliers and a square silver pendant dotted with one milky gem. And a floral earring erupts in rays of diamante, at its centre a chunky Fendi pearl.