Fendi’s Eaux d’Artifice: A Century of Roman Splendor Reimagined

FENDI Eaux d’Artifice 100th Anniversary Necklace

Rome has always had a way of pulling you in—not with noise or spectacle, but with that quiet, theatrical confidence only the Eternal City can conjure. For its 100th anniversary, Fendi turns to this very spirit and distills it into something intimate, luminous, and unmistakably Roman: Eaux d’Artifice, a haute-joaillerie collection imagined by Delfina Delettrez Fendi.

It is not a predictable tribute. It is not a retrospective.

It is a story—one that begins with fountains, cinema, and a designer whose roots are tangled deep in Rome’s stone and light.

Where Water Meets Architecture

Growing up in Rome means living alongside fountains the way others live alongside streetlights. They catch your eye when you’re rushing, calm you when you’re lost, and surprise you when you least expect it. For Delfina, these fountains were part of her daily landscape—yet also blueprints of imagination.

“Fountains are pure duality,” she often says. “Soft and powerful. Fluid and architectural. Familiar yet otherworldly.”

This tension—between stillness and movement, delicacy and monumental force—became the heartbeat of the collection. Each jewel feels like a water structure frozen mid-performance: arches, cascades, ripples captured in diamonds, crystal rock, and Fendi’s quiet signature—the double F—woven in so subtly you’re never quite sure whether you saw it or only dreamed it.

FENDI Eaux d’Artifice 100th Anniversary Necklace

The Spark: Kenneth Anger’s Nighttime Dream

The collection borrows not only from Rome’s physical fountains, but also from their cinematic afterlife. In 1953, American filmmaker Kenneth Anger shot Eaux d’Artifice, a surreal short filmed entirely at night in the fountain gardens of Villa d’Este. It is a film of illusions: water becomes light, shadows become choreography, and the viewer is never fully grounded.

Delfina carried this film in her memory for years.

“It stayed with me because of its mystery,” she recalls. “The way it plays with perspective—what you see, what you don’t, what you think you’ve seen.”

The collection shares that same sensibility: restrained drama, quiet theatrics, and a sense that behind every shimmer, a secret is being kept.

Designing for a Century

Centenary collections often fall into the trap of grandeur for grandeur’s sake. Delfina’s instinct was the opposite. To honor Fendi’s first hundred years, she did not create louder pieces—she created clearer ones.

“Thinking about a century allowed me to work less linearly,” she explains. “Fendi’s history is rich, but never heavy. Reinvention is part of our DNA.”

Her approach to archives was not archaeological; it was conversational. She let the brand’s codes drift toward her—craftsmanship, hidden precision, artisan ingenuity—and allowed those elements to mingle with her own sensibilities. The boundary between Delfina and Fendi, she says, “barely exists.”

Inside the Collection

Eaux d’Artifice presents:

• Three parures, each with its own personality

• Three sculptural cocktail rings, made for collectors

• The Cento necklace, the symbolic centerpiece of the anniversary

FENDI Eaux d’Artifice Sunset Rings Groupage, Fortuna Necklace, and Ovato Bracelet

The Cento necklace, in particular, is a masterclass in subtle architectural storytelling. At first glance, it feels classically Roman—arches, vaults, geometries. Look closer, and the hidden elements emerge: numerical nods to the centenary, futuristic hints, and those elusive Fs tucked beneath sculptural curves. It is a necklace with tension, movement, and a theatricality that feels unmistakably Roman.

The Difficulties and the Delights

The most challenging piece for Delfina was the Cento set, where tiny crystals of rock were carved like lenses—at once magnifying and softening the diamonds beneath them. The result is a cloud-like brilliance, as if the stones were underwater yet glowing from within.

Her personal favorite, however, is the Fortuna set. Stones appear suspended in mid-air, worn dramatically on one side of the neck. It is asymmetry done with Roman confidence—bold but not loud, explosive without ever spelling it out.

Delfina Delettres is wearing FENDI Eaux d’Artifice Cento Earrings, Bracelet and ring from the set.

A New Lightness

What stands out in the entire collection is a newfound lightness—deliberate, modern, and quietly radical.

Delfina describes this shift simply:

“Before, jewellery meant adding. Now I find meaning in taking away.”

This subtraction—this willingness to remove ornament until only intention remains—gives the pieces an almost skeletal elegance. They feel weightless, though their craft is anything but.

A Century Marked Not by Echoes, but by Evolution

With Eaux d’Artifice, Fendi celebrates 100 years not by looking back, but by turning the city’s fountains into jewellery, its shadows into sculptures, its memories into movement.

It is a collection filled with Rome’s contradictions—its grandeur and intimacy, its drama and restraint, its history and ceaseless reinvention.

A century deserves more than nostalgia.

Delfina Delettrez Fendi delivers something rarer: a continuation.