• Tim Blanks
• December 2, 2014

From one tiny germ of anidea—a sketch of a vintage scarf—Karl Lagerfeld created a symphony of stripesfor Fendi’s Pre-Fall collection. Testament to his protean imagination, hisstripes tapped a multitude of associations. A shift banded in leather, suede,and wool evoked the old college stripe. In black and white, the bands couldhave been piano keys or something dreamed up by a Russian Constructivist. Therewas a coat arduously put together from strips of intensely toned, preciselytrimmed mink that looked like a mind-blower a witch doctor might don for hisultimate communion with the great beyond. And then, an elongated pleated dresscomposed of strips of silk and organza, as supremely elegant as anything fromBertolucci's The Conformist, but zipped and collared like a baseballjacket and delivered in the lurid coloration of a test pattern from a 1980s TVset.

That particular piece was a perfect articulation of the fundamental tensionthat loans Fendi its irresistible fearlessness. Decades of heritage infused bymoments of iconoclasm mean that Lagerfeld and Silvia Venturini Fendi can drawon the atelier's extraordinary craftsmanship to create pieces that marry thesubstantial and the throwaway. Nothing made that more obvious here than a hugepuffball of fox, exhaustively graded light to dark in its natural shades but soweightless it could be rolled into a ball and packed away like a T-shirt.

The same train of thought was surely behind an outfit composed of the sweetestcocktail dress in pink organza (decorated with bug-eyed Little Monsters,Fendi's favorite leitmotif, here in mink with a fluffy fox mustache) topped bya biker vest in pink mink lined in gold leather, like the foil on a FerreroRocher. Really? Resistance is surely futile in the face of such frippery. Samewith a flapper dress in silk tattered to look like fur.

There is a giddiness to Fendi that suspends judgment on issues as mundane asgood taste. Reinforced this season as a house code alongside the Bag Bugs andthe orchids was the crocodile tail, composed of baguettes as a necklace or as aclosure on a new backpack. It was Karl's reminder that one of the F's in Fendi'sFF logo stands for Fun.

Credit  : //www.style.com/fashion-shows/pre-fall-2015/fendi