Arab News | Yara Shahidi fronts Fendi’s new campaign

DUBAI: Part-Middle Eastern actress Yara Shahidi starred in Fendi’s new My Peekaboo campaign, released this week, appearing alongside Italian actresses Monica Bellucci and Valeria Golino and Chinese actress Tang Yan in a series of films shot in Rome.

Shot by Italian photographer Laura Sciacovelli, the campaign is set backstage on a film set, a nod to Fendi’s long association with Italian cinema.

Bellucci leads the campaign, with Golino, Tang and Shahidi each given a separate film. Tang is a Fendi spokesperson.

Shahidi wore a crisp white shirt with a high collar left open at the neck, her hair in loose natural curls and her makeup kept minimal. She changed into a long-sleeved black lace dress with a scalloped hem, cut above the knee, worn with black strappy heels and a black leather Peekaboo stamped “Y.S.” across the front strap. “A dream,” Shahidi wrote in the comments beneath the post on Instagram.

My Peekaboo is a reworking of the house’s Peekaboo bag by Maria Grazia Chiuri, the Italian designer’s first collection since being named Fendi’s chief creative officer last year. Chiuri returned the bag to its original silhouette and reinstated the opening that gave it its name, the fold that reveals the lining inside. Fendi opened the accompanying personalization service on Sept. 3, letting customers add their own initials in boutiques and online. Each of the four actresses carried a monogrammed version.

Shahidi grew up around film sets. Her father is a cinematographer and her mother an actress in commercials, and she began working in print and commercials as a child alongside them and her brothers. She was 14 when she was cast in the sitcom “Black-ish,” and went on to star in its spin-off “Grown-ish.”

She studied at Harvard and played Tinker Bell in Disney’s “Peter Pan and Wendy.” In 2023, she joined actors on the picket lines during the Hollywood strikes, saying she stood alongside her peers.

She has designed two collections for Adidas and fronted campaigns for Dior and for Jean-Paul Gaultier’s “Divine” fragrance in 2023.