Beast to Beauty: Artisans win hands down
Fendi set out to find artisans who still live and breathe traditional crafts from the different regions of Italy to work with the company on special editions of its Baguette bag. It chose a specialist leathergoods manufacturer in Florence as its partner for Tuscany.
Luxury brand Fendi has launched a project called Hand In Hand, for which it has asked 20 different ateliers from 20 different parts of Italy to come up with their own interpretations of the brand’s Baguette bag. Its creative director for accessories and men’s collections, Silvia Venturini Fendi, created the Baguette in 1997.
An early contribution to the project is a version of the Baguette from Florence-based leather artisan workshop Fratelli Peroni. Peroni artisans created the bag from a single, seamless piece of moulded veg-tanned leather and used a traditional technique called ‘cuoietto artistico fiorentino’ to create a Baguette without stitches.
Fratelli Peroni has worked continuously since the 1950s. It was founded by brothers Roberto and Piero Peroni and is still family-owned. Piero’s sons, Maurizio and Marco are now involved in running the business with him, and a total of eight artisans are active in the workshop.
Intrinsic beauty
Commenting on the wider project, Ms Venturini Fendi says: “Each bag is unique, because the imperfections inherent to handmade craftsmanship are what express intrinsic beauty. Fashion often focuses on the designer, and I think it’s time that we celebrated the community of artisans behind these amazing creations.”Florence’s leather specialists represent a fine example of this artisanship. The Tuscan city’s leather-making traditions are ancient and even though it was the early part of the twentieth century before ‘cuoietto artistico fiorentino’ became popular, the technique owes much to the work of the artisans of the sixteenth century. Fratelli Peroni itself began making products using this method in the 1970s. A popular item from its range that shows the beauty of the technique to good effect is a coin-purse. Hand-made from vegetable-tanned leather, the purse, known locally as the ‘tacco Peroni’, which is quite small but 37 separate steps are required to create it.
What the artisans do first is cut a piece of leather and dip it into warm water to make it “elastic and malleable”. Then the material is placed onto a mould and left to dry for eight hours resulting in leather that is rigid enough to hold the shape the skilled artisans give it. No stitches are necessary. Decoration is entirely by hand, using natural dyes and, sometimes, gold leaf, applied using traditional techniques with bronze punches and wheels. Accessory decoration became a craft in its own right in the Florentine workshops of the nineteenth century.
Special Baguette
Fratelli Peroni describes the ‘cuoietto artistico fiorentino’ as a natural step forward from the beginnings of the tanning industry. Once men and women had mastered the knack of treating hides and skins so that they would not putrefy, finding ways to decorate the material was only logical. It argues that this reached its high point in Italy at the time of the Renaissance and, especially, in the birthplace of the Renaissance, Florence. Nevertheless, it estimates that very few artisan workshops using the technique are left in the city now. “Perhaps there are only three or four remaining,” the company says.
This was still enough to catch the eye of Silvia Venturini Fendi when she and her team were putting in place their plans for the Hand In Hand project last year. A Fendi delegation visited the Peroni workshop one day, viewed the articles in the company’s showroom and initiated a dialogue about using the ‘cuoietto artistico fiorentino’ technique to make one of the special Baguettes. With a Baguette-shaped mould around which to wrap the leather, the bag is formed in a similar way to a ‘tacco Peroni’ coin purse.
Reconnection to the Renaissance
Peroni has said it liked the idea from the outset, explaining to World Leather that “reconnecting to a tradition that comes from the Renaissance” could send an important message to the entire industry. Even high-end Italian brands have become too focused on production lines, Peroni argues, and are, perhaps, in some danger of losing sight of the “artisan values” that have led to leathergoods made in Italy becoming so popular among discerning consumers in all parts of the world.
For her part, Silvia Venturini Fendi explains that Hand In Hand is a project in which she wanted to show “what is behind a beautiful product”. She says she wanted to do this by working with people who are still cultivating centuries-old skills and handing the techniques on from generation to generation.
She continues: “I chose the very best, people who are doing unique things. This is what interests me; I wanted to support these incredible people. Their work, doing everything by hand, is so romantic. It’s the imperfections in hand-made things that make them so interesting and beautiful. We say these people are artisans but, to me, they are more than that. They are artists.”
One of the founders, Piero Peroni, applying gold leaf to leather in the Fratelli Peroni workshop in Florence. Silvia Venturini Fendi launched the Hand In Hand project to promote and celebrate the skill of artisans from all parts of Italy.
Credit: Fratelli Peroni
