An architecture and fashion crossover takes place between Kengo Kuma and FENDI for the fashion house’s Spring/Summer 2024 menswear show. For the recent collection, Kuma unveils his radical iterations of FENDI’s Peekaboo, Baguette Soft Trunk, and FENDI Flow sneakers by constructing them in traditional washi paper, woven bamboo, birch bark, and Tuscan olivewood. His architectural flair for the collection comes from his reverence for ancient Japanese craftsmanship and raw natural materials that surface and materialize into bags and sneakers.

He was one of the first to understand the importance of building nature into architecture both inside and out,’ Silvia Venturini Fendi, the FENDI’s Artistic Director, states. The statement has been complemented by Kengo Kuma’s words where he says that nature and craft have always been at the center of his work as an architect and a designer. ‘When Fendi asked me to reflect on their bags and shoes, I thought of them like small architectural projects on a human scale,’ the architect notes.