Mary Jane Keitel

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"Fendi Fiend" combines 2024 Italian fashion, fascist architecture and 16th-century Gregorian cartography. Inspired by the recent collection from the luxury design house Fendi, I loved the dominant colors: enigmatic red/orange; light, intense blue; tan and brown. (Hard to reproduce!) The building, with its 6x9 archways in a New Classicism style, is, today, the headquarters of Fendi on the Plaza della Civita Italiana in Rome. The building was designed in 1935 at the behest of Benito Mussolini to mark his 20 years in power and for the Esposizione Universal Roma. It was intended to be the centerpiece of the 1942 World's Fair but the onset of WWII thwarted those plans. The number of archways is rumored to represent the number of letters in Mussolini's name. Architecture critic Owen Hatherly compared the building to the fashion industry itself "...shamelessly elitist, willfully sinister, hierarchical...minimalism that belies an obsession with the finest possible materials and the severest cut." The map of the port of Citavecchia from about 1580 is found in the Vatican's Map Gallery-- itself a monument to Italy's influence in the world.

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