Roman Molds, Fendi’s collaboration with Kueng Caputo

For the last 12 years, FENDI has been supporting creativity and design through its partnership with Design Miami in Miami, Milan and Basel. The Roman luxury house shares important values with the design world, such as boundless creativity, excellence, quality and a passion for making things by hand. Each project developed since 2008 represents a wonderful admixture and “contamination” between design and fashion, highlighting their creative, functional, experimentation and research affinities.

This year, FENDI has commissioned the Zurich based design studio Kueng Caputo to create a family of new design pieces intended to decorate the exterior colonnade of its iconic headquarters, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, on the Roman outskirts. The building, sometimes referred to as the Colosseo Quadrato, or Square Colosseum, is the most recognizable 20th century addition to the Roman landscape with its signature imposing white travertine facades of massive arched colonnades. This architectural icon serves as the starting point for Kueng Caputo’s exploration of the ways in which the building and FENDI DNA interact. The resulting collection, entitled Roman Molds, captures the tension that has historically informed much of the house’s best output- traditional craft disrupted by innovation.

Lovis Caputo and Sarah Kueng have endeavored to make their commission reflect FENDI’s approach to originality in materiality and form, researching the brand’s archives to understand its history of innovation. The Swiss designers were driven by this spirit to find a new expression of FENDI.

Inspired by the fur technique developed in the 1950’s by FENDI, in which grosgrain and velvet ribbons were combined with fur to create a more revealing silhouette, with added lightness, Kueng Caputo have combined two of the most divergent materials possible, FENDI’s iconic, supple, Selleria Roman leather and the versatile, yet unpretentious, terracotta brick. 

The designers were immediately drawn to the special qualities of the Roman saddle leather and the richly saturated colors FENDI has achieved with them. The natural delicately pebbled surface of the Selleria leather has a depth of color and feel that is unique and inspired the duo to explore its many possibilities. They worked to transform and upcycle the leather into a structural material, giving it solidity and strength. The Selleria leather is therefore given new life and combined with artisanal bricks that have been carved and shaped, in a manner that is more akin to cutting a garment pattern than the traditional techniques used in brick construction.

In this way, bricks are cut to represent the iconic arches of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. Then they are further elevated by the application of specially developed ceramic glazes, creating blocks of color.

The ten pieces that make up the Roman Molds collection are meant to be building blocks that in multiplication would create a series of intimate “rooms” for socializing, escaping and working on the grand loggias of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. A unifying theme of Kueng Caputo’s project is the use and reinterpretation of the iconic repeating arches of the facade.

Roman Molds includes several variations on seating, like a sensuous tête-à-tête bench and stools constructed of undulating leather. There is a long table with a FENDI Yellow top, a delicate bright pink table, a robust desk, room dividers and a palm tree to create intimacy and scale.

This collection is a study of opposites and the achievement of harmony through the application of imaginative design with skill and craft.  Roman Molds is a fitting expression of the creativity and innovation that are the hallmarks of FENDI.