As FENDI celebrates its centenary, the Maison returns to the eternal city that shaped its soul: Rome. Yet as opposed to indulging in the mere crimson wrapped around the peak of nostalgia, Delfina Delettrez Fendi finds inspiration through a more poetic muse — the city’s fountains and their dreamlike portrayal in Kenneth Anger’s 1954 avant-garde film Eaux d’Artifice. The High Jewellery collection is but more than just an ode to impeccable craftsmanship. It rather mirrors a cultural meditation formed from the imaginative senses of water, symbolising rebirth, femininity, and movement — a narrative that flows between Rome’s ancient engineering, Renaissance grandeur, and modern cinematic myth-making.
Cinema Meets Classicism
In Anger’s surreal nocturne filmed at Villa d’Este, the fountains flow in varying parallels, deliberately tuned and kindred to the instrumental symphonies – glowing, splashing, flickering like crystalline fireworks against shadowy Renaissance architecture. Here, Delfina draws dramatic nuances of its simultaneous fluidity, by channeling the duality of water and stone into this high jewellery collection, in order to potently authenticate aspirational accoutrement, that’s undoubtedly monumental by nature.
“Rome’s fountains are not just ornament,” Delfina suggests through her work. “They are living theatre — a dialogue between nature, architecture, and myth.” With Eaux d’Artifice, she extends this dialogue into jewellery, where gems embody the shifting moods of water: reflective, spontaneous, infinite.
Symbolism in Stones
Each piece reads like a miniature allegory.
With its 20.25 carat Fancy Vivid Flawless Yellow diamond cascading amid a hundred smaller stones, the Centennial Necklace speaks of legacy and continuity — one diamond for each year, commemorating FENDI’s century milestone.
FENDI Eaux d’Artifice 100th Anniversary Necklace
As for the Cento Parure, its mesmerising beauty ripples with sapphires and diamonds in ombré tones, echoing water’s iridescent surface.
FENDI Eaux-dArtifice Ovato Bracelet
And complementary to the Ovato Set, anchored by Santa Maria aquamarines, the collection becomes a visionary emphasis of jewellery craftsmanship — mimicking clarity and cyclical flow.
FENDI Eaux-dArtifice Fortuna Necklace
In close regard to the Fortuna Necklace, silently opulent by design — frames rubies within a helix of diamonds, symbolising life’s spirals and water’s hypnotic pull.
FENDI Eaux d’Artifice Sunset Rings Groupage
Even the cocktail rings — fiery topaz, pink spinel, and yellow sapphire — become metaphors for twilight on stone basins, a figurative vision of Roman sunsets softly effacing into liquid colour.
A Roman Palimpsest
Rome itself becomes a silent collaborator in this collection. Its fountains, once feats of hydraulic genius, have always mirrored more than water alone — reflecting history, empire, and the lives that have unfolded around them. Like Anger’s film, Delfina’s jewels freeze these reflections into moments of perpetual motion.
FENDI Eaux d’Artifice Cento Earrings
The palette of Eaux d’Artifice — fiery rubies, verdant emeralds, luminous aquamarines — becomes a living palimpsest of the Roman garden, capturing moss, fireworks, blossoms, and fading light. Moving beyond mimicry, it reinterprets heritage, transforming it into fluid symbols of modern artistry.
Jewellery as Cultural Memory
Marking its centenary, FENDI extends beyond fashion and luxury into the realm of culture. Eaux d’Artifice is jewellery as memory — cinematic, architectural, and elemental. By weaving together Italian classicism, avant-garde cinema, and the eternal vitality of water, Delfina Delettrez Fendi has articulately curated a quiet exaggeration of Rome itself: a city forever in motion, yet eternal at its essence.
FENDI High Jewellery 2025_Making Of
Even so, the maison demonstrates that true artistry flows beyond the constraints of time — water, it flows, refracting history, catching the light of the present, and shaping the future. And by drawing inspiration from an unlikely yet poetic source — its cinematic reimagining of Kenneth Anger’s 1954 Eaux d’Artifice engineers a narrative, in proud dedication to rebirth, femininity, and a movement that celebrates the fluidity of form, the power of imagination, and the enduring spirit of Roman artistry.
