Her heart divided between love for nature and creativity, Ilaria Venturini Fendi has given life to Carmina Campus, strongly feeling that a change in society’s way of life and consumption is dramatically urgent and necessary in order to cope with environment’s growing impairment.
In less than two years Carmina Campus has become a workshop that makes bags, accessories, pieces of furniture and design.
It employs rejected virgin materials or gives new life and use to textiles, metals, plastic, wood… It chose not to reconvert them through industrial processes, which would imply the use of chemical agents. Every sort of material is considered, examined, handled and worked by expert Italian hands as if it were extremely rare and precious. Its original use is forgotten and a piece of garden shade, an old embroidered cushion, a zip found in a job lot, acquire a value and a dignity previously unknown to themselves. That’s how, playing around with ideas - at times inspired by the materials at hand, others wanting to make an object with specific new features - a Carmina Campus bag, lamp, bracelet, is born.
This is why no two items of the same kind are ever identical.
The history of each single piece is hand written on a tag, that comes with it, bearing details on the origin and life of its specific materials, on time used for its creation and making, and an archive number.
Carmina Campus reclaims goods from the most different suppliers, but it also transforms objects and semi-finished products bought from working communities of the Third world. Since the very beginning, Carmina Campus has been working with NGOs operating mostly in Africa, to fund projects and work programmes for the benefit of women and supporting actions in favour of environmental protection.
BAGS are always limited editions, due to the materials employed and the special workmanship required. Every bag of the same style is unique in colours, trimmings, materials.
If you bought a Carmina Campus bag and would like to know more about it, you can get in touch with us and consult our archives.
PIECES OF FURNITURE and DESIGN are also one-of-a-kind pieces. Chairs, arm-chairs, lamps and other items are now for sale at RE(f)USE and can be also bought on our web-site.