Fendi's artisans, named

The atelier sits on the third floor of Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, that travertine monument to Mussolini-era geometry that Fendi has occupied since 2015. Inside, Anna Fontana is bent over a Peekaboo frame, one hand steadying the turnlock mechanism while the other guides a curved needle through two layers of calf. The stitch is a saddle stitch, done by hand, six millimetres apart. She has been doing this for twenty-two years.

Fontana is fifty-one. She joined Fendi's leather atelier in 2002, trained under Carla Fendi herself during the last years of the family's operational control. Her route was the traditional one: technical school in the Marche, an apprenticeship at a small goods workshop in Tolentino, then Rome. She does not give interviews often. When she does, she speaks about tension — the exact pull required to seat a stitch without distorting the leather's hand.

The Peekaboo debuted in 2008. Silvia Venturini Fendi designed it as a doctor's bag that opened from the centre, two compartments that revealed themselves in sequence. The frame is rigid, the body soft, and the construction requires that those two elements marry without compromise. Fontana was assigned to the first prototype. She recalls, in a 2019 conversation with Vogue Italia, that the initial frame was too heavy. They remade it in aluminium, then again in a composite. The final version weighs sixty grams.

Her work begins with the frame. Each Peekaboo frame arrives at her station pre-formed but unfinished. She wraps it in leather, mitring the corners by hand, then affixes the turnlock. The lock is not decorative. It must engage cleanly, release without resistance, and withstand several thousand cycles. She tests each one. If it catches, even slightly, she dismantles it.

The bag's body is cut and skived elsewhere in the atelier, but Fontana assembles it. She aligns the two compartments, stitches the gussets, then mounts the whole structure onto the frame. This is the point of highest risk. If the leather is pulled too taut, the bag will not close evenly. Too loose, and it sags. There is no template for this. Fontana works by feel, adjusting tension as she stitches, pausing every few centimetres to test the closure.

She produces, on average, one Peekaboo every two days. That includes the frame wrap, the assembly, and the final inspection. Custom orders — two-tone bodies, exotic skins, hand-painted panels — take longer. A crocodile Peekaboo, she says, requires four days. The skin must be matched across both compartments, the scales aligned so that the pattern reads as continuous even when the bag is open.

Fontana is not the only artisan working on the Peekaboo. Fendi's atelier employs thirty-four leather specialists, each with a primary assignment. Marco Bellini handles the interior pockets. Giulia Moretti skives the gussets. Luca Santoro applies the logo plaques. But Fontana is the one who assembles the frame, and in the atelier's internal hierarchy, that role carries weight. The frame is the Peekaboo's signature. If it fails, the bag fails.

She was born in Macerata, in the Marche, a region that has supplied Italy's luxury houses with leather workers for a century. Her father was a cobbler. Her mother sewed gloves for a contractor in Pesaro. Fontana attended the Istituto Professionale per l'Industria e l'Artigianato, a technical school that still teaches traditional leather techniques — lasting, burnishing, saddle stitching by hand. She graduated in 1992, apprenticed at a small workshop that made belts and wallets for Gucci and Prada, then moved to Rome in 2001.

Her first year at Fendi was spent in what the atelier calls formazione continua — continuous training. She worked alongside Carla Fendi, who was then seventy and still overseeing production. Carla's method, Fontana has said, was to sit beside a new artisan and watch. She did not correct mistakes immediately. She waited until the piece was finished, then pointed out where the tension had shifted, where a stitch had pulled the leather off-grain. Fontana recalls making the same wallet fifteen times before Carla approved it.

The Peekaboo arrived six years into her tenure. Silvia Venturini Fendi had been designing bags for the house since the 1990s — the Baguette, the Spy, the Chef — but the Peekaboo was the first to centre on structure rather than ornament. It had no logo-laden hardware, no statement clasp. The design was the frame itself, and the frame required a level of precision that Fendi's atelier had not previously needed to sustain at scale.

Fontana was chosen, she believes, because of her background in small leather goods. A wallet and a structured bag share a logic: every fold must land in the same place, every stitch must hold the same tension. She built the first prototype in May 2008. It took six days. By the time the Peekaboo reached production, she had reduced that to two.

The bag's success was not immediate. It was priced at €1,850 at launch, expensive but not exorbitant, and it sold steadily rather than sensationally. What changed, Fontana says, was customisation. In 2012, Fendi introduced the Peekaboo Selleria, a hand-stitched version with contrast topstitching and a higher price point. Customers could specify leather type, colour, and lining. Orders doubled. By 2015, the Peekaboo accounted for thirty per cent of Fendi's handbag revenue.

Fontana now trains younger artisans. Fendi hires four to six apprentices each year, most of them from the same technical schools in the Marche that Fontana attended. The training period is eighteen months. Apprentices begin with small leather goods — cardholders, coin purses — then move to soft bags, then to structured pieces. The Peekaboo is considered an advanced assignment. Fontana estimates that fewer than half of the apprentices who enter the atelier will eventually work on it.

She is unsentimental about this. The atelier, she says, is not a place for improvisation. Every bag must meet the same standard, and that standard is high enough that many capable artisans will not reach it. She does not see this as exclusionary. She sees it as facture — the bargain between maker and object.

Her own work has changed little in two decades. She still hand-stitches the frame, still tests each turnlock, still adjusts tension by feel. What has changed is scale. In 2008, Fendi produced several hundred Peekaboos a month. Now, the atelier produces several thousand. Fontana's output has remained constant — one bag every two days — but the team around her has grown. There are now five artisans working on Peekaboo frames, all trained by Fontana, all working to her specifications.

She does not own a Peekaboo. When asked why, in that 2019 Vogue Italia interview, she said that she sees enough of them at work. Off the clock, she carries a black leather tote, unbranded, bought at a market in Testaccio. It is a reasonable answer, though one suspects it is also a professional one. The bag she makes is not for her. It is for someone else, someone willing to pay €4,200 for thirty hours of her attention. That transaction, she has said, is enough.