Ilaria Venturini Fendi

The youngest daughter of Anna Fendi, Ilaria Venturini Fendi was Fendissime Accessories Creative Director and Fendi Shoe Designer in the family company. Few years after the brand was sold to a French group she stepped out to become an organic farmer.

Taking a brief hiatus from fashion, she converted a large piece of land just outside of Rome into an all organic farm, I Casali del Pino, that was driven by a vision of restoration according to bio-architecture and landscape safeguarding.

Inspired by her experience on the farm, she returned to her roots as a fashion designer and in 2006 created the Carmina Campus brand which unites ethical sustainability and fashion through a unique model of beauty, luxury and consumer responsibility.

Ilaria fuses her work with the environmental values she believes in and personally lives by. Her know-how as a designer is matching the skilled craftsmanship of Italian artisans in the making of bags, accessories and furniture with all sorts of reclaimed materials.

Shortly after Carmina Campus was created, she started working in Africa to produce semi-finished items that would be used in a special made in Italy line. The project was supporting a community of disadvantaged women in Cameroon.

She has brought job enrichment to entire communities in Africa with the project philosophy “NOT CHARITY, JUST WORK” for a working project in Nairobi, Kenya, developed in collaboration with the UN-WTO agency International Trade Centre (ITC). The same approach is the guiding principle of a rehab working project in Italian prisons carried out in collaboration with Socially MadeinItaly.

Often requested as speaker, such as at Rio+20 during the ITC session on Ethical Fashion and at Suzy Menkes' International Herald Tribune 2012 luxury conference, she has received various international awards for spotlighting Ethical Fashion and its place in the future.

Among others, in 2011 she received the Fashion4Developmet Award from the hands of Franca Sozzani in Seoul and in 2012 the Excellence in Ethical Business Award by Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings.

In September 2015, she was a speaker at the "Global Maker Movement - The Culture & the consumption Forum", organised by the Beijing Design Week.

She supports campaigns in favour of social development and sustainable economy and is a member of "The Circle", a non-profit organisation created in the UK by Annie Lennox and Livia Firth to promote women's rights and empowerment.

"As a designer, I feel responsible for the life cycles of the objects I create. Facing the social and environmental problems of today's world, I think the general idea of beauty involved in the concept of design should be enriched by the values of truth and good." Ilaria Venturini Fendi