Fendi's artisans, named

The atelier sits on the fourth floor of Fendi's Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, the white travertine cube that Romans still call the Square Colosseum. Light comes in from three sides. At a long wooden table, Anna Fontana is hand-stitching the gusset of a Peekaboo bag. She has been doing this, in one form or another, for twenty-two years.

Her hands move without hesitation. The saddle stitch advances at a rhythm that suggests muscle memory rather than conscious thought — needle through, pull taut, needle back, pull again. Six stitches per inch. The leather is a soft calfskin in what Fendi calls cuoio romano, a particular ochre that photographs warmer than it appears in hand. Fontana pauses only to re-wax her thread.

"People think it's about speed," she said in a 2019 interview with Vogue Italia. "It's about evenness. If one stitch is tighter than the next, the bag will pull."

She is one of seventeen artisans currently working in Fendi's leather atelier. The number has held steady for a decade, though the average tenure has crept upward. Most have been with the house for fifteen years or more. Fontana is neither the most senior nor the least. She is, however, the artisan most often assigned to construct Peekaboos destined for the archive or for certain private clients whose names do not appear in press releases.

This is not a formal title. Fendi does not operate that way. But it is understood.

Training, or the Lack of Shortcuts

Fontana arrived at Fendi in 2002, not long after the house had been acquired by LVMH. She had trained at a small Florentine workshop that specialised in document cases and blotters — the sort of firm that still exists, barely, supplying hotel desks and law offices. Her first six months at Fendi were spent exclusively on interior pockets. Not the bags themselves. Just the flat cotton pockets that sit inside them, invisible to anyone but the user.

"You learn the geometry of a bag from the inside out," she told Il Sole 24 Ore in 2021. "If the pocket is off by two millimetres, the whole structure shifts."

The Peekaboo, designed by Silvia Venturini Fendi in 2008, is named for the way it opens: a central twist-lock releases two symmetrical flaps that fold back to reveal the interior. The bag has no front or back in the traditional sense. Both sides are equally finished. This means every seam, every stitch line, every edge must be resolved twice. It is not, by atelier standards, an especially complex construction. But it is unforgiving.

Fontana spent her first year working on Peekaboos exclusively on the lining. She did not touch the outer shell until 2010.

The Signature Piece, Deconstructed

A standard Peekaboo requires thirty-three pattern pieces and roughly eighteen hours of bench time, not including the cutting or the hardware installation, both of which happen elsewhere. Fontana's role begins once the pieces have been skived — thinned at the edges so that when two layers meet, the seam lies flat — and ends when the bag is handed to the quality-control team for a final inspection.

She works alone. This is not a romantic detail. It is a practical one. The Peekaboo's construction requires the artisan to flip the bag inside-out twice during assembly, and a second pair of hands, however well-intentioned, tends to complicate the sequence.

The most critical moment comes early: the attachment of the gusset to the base. The two pieces must marry at a precise angle, and the stitching must be invisible from the exterior. Fontana uses a curved needle for this, a tool she had made to her specifications by a supplier in Scandicci. The curve allows her to work from the inside while maintaining a sightline to the outer seam. She estimates she has stitched this join somewhere north of four thousand times.

"You stop counting," she said.

What the Work Actually Looks Like

The atelier operates on a quota system, though the term is never used aloud. Each artisan is expected to complete a certain number of pieces per week, the figure adjusted according to the complexity of the design and the artisan's experience. For Fontana, the number is typically four Peekaboos, sometimes five if the leather is particularly cooperative.

Cooperative, in this context, means consistent. Calfskin varies. Even within a single hide, the hand can shift from one section to the next. Fontana has learned to read these variations before she begins stitching, adjusting her tension accordingly. A softer section requires a lighter pull. A firmer section can take more force. The difference is subtle enough that it would not register on a tensile strength test, but it matters.

She works in silence, or near-silence. The atelier is not a quiet place — there is the hum of the edge-painting machine in the corner, the occasional scrape of a cutting mat being repositioned — but conversation is minimal. Fontana wears a small radio earpiece tuned to a classical station, though she claims not to register what is playing.

"If I can tell you what piece was on, I wasn't concentrating," she told Vogue Italia.

The Question of Authorship

Fendi does not sign its bags with the artisan's name, as Hermès does with its Birkins and Kellys. There is no discreet code stamped inside the Peekaboo to indicate who made it. This is a deliberate choice, rooted in the house's view that the work is collective. Fontana cuts the leather, but she did not tan it. She stitches the gusset, but she did not mill the hardware. To foreground one name, the reasoning goes, is to misrepresent the process.

Fontana herself is ambivalent on this point. "I don't need my name in the bag," she said in 2021. "But I know which ones are mine."

She can identify her work in photographs. The tell is in the stitch line along the top edge, where the flap meets the body. Most artisans start the stitch sequence at the centre and work outward. Fontana starts at the hinge and works toward the lock. The result is nearly identical, but the thread tension distributes differently. To her eye, the difference is obvious.

To most others, it is not.

What Comes Next

Fontana is forty-seven. She has no plans to leave Fendi, though she has been approached twice by smaller houses looking to establish or revive their leather ateliers. The offers were serious. She declined both.

"I know this bag," she said. "I know what it should feel like when the lock clicks, how much the leather should give when you press the gusset. I don't want to start over."

The atelier has begun training two new artisans, both in their mid-twenties. Fontana is not formally their instructor, but she has been asked to review their work before it leaves the bench. This is understood to be a precursor to a more official role, though no title has been discussed.

She is, by her own admission, a exacting reviewer. A seam that most would pass, she will ask to be redone. Not because it is wrong, precisely, but because it is not yet right.

"There is a difference," she said, "between a bag that works and a bag that will still work in twenty years."

The Peekaboo she is currently stitching is destined for a client in Tokyo. She does not know the client's name. She knows only that the leather is cuoio romano, that the hardware is palladium-plated, and that the interior is lined in suede the colour of burnt umber. She knows, too, that in eighteen hours, give or take, the bag will be finished.

And then she will begin the next one.