A fitting room on Via della Fontanella di Borghese, sometime in the mid-Eighties
A fitting room on Via della Fontanella di Borghese, sometime in the mid-Eighties. Carla Fendi adjusts a sable collar, steps back, narrows her eyes. The woman in the mirror — not a model, a client, someone whose name appears in certain address books — turns once, slowly. The fur moves with her. Not against her. Carla nods. This is the work.
Fendi has never been a house of singular vision. Five sisters ran it for decades, and before them, their parents sold leather and fur from a single Roman shopfront. But if you ask which women shaped the house — which faces and bodies gave it form in the public mind — three names surface with unusual consistency among those who worked there, wrote about it, or simply paid attention.
Anna Piaggi: The Archivist in Motion
Piaggi was not a muse in the traditional sense. She was a journalist, an editor at Vogue Italia, a woman who treated her own body as a kind of moving exhibition space. But Karl Lagerfeld, who began his fifty-four-year collaboration with Fendi in 1965, drew her constantly. Hundreds of illustrations, published in Vanity and later collected in books that now trade for alarming sums on the secondary market.
What Fendi took from Piaggi was not her silhouette — she was short, round-faced, given to turbans and mismatched patterns that would have terrified a less confident woman — but her appetite. She wore Fendi fur treated like fabric: cut into geometric patches, dyed violet or tangerine, stitched onto denim or layered over knit. She made it look like clothing, not inheritance.
Lagerfeld's technical innovations at Fendi — the intarsia work, the fur woven with canvas, the famous selleria stitching borrowed from saddle-making — were not invented for Piaggi. But they were, one suspects, encouraged by her. She had no reverence for materials. She wanted them to perform.
By the late Seventies, Fendi's runway shows featured fur treated with a lightness that bordered on disrespect. A mink blouson cut like a bomber jacket. A sable vest over a cotton T-shirt. Piaggi wore these pieces in Milan, in Paris, in her tiny apartment on Via Montenapoleone, which was itself a kind of installation — racks of clothing organised by colour, hatboxes stacked to the ceiling, a chandelier hung with brooches.
She died in 2012. Lagerfeld kept drawing her.
Delfina Delettrez Fendi: The Inheritor Who Stayed
Delfina is Silvia Fendi's daughter, which makes her fourth-generation. She joined the house officially in her twenties, after studying jewellery in London and launching her own line — silver rings shaped like anatomical hearts, earrings that looked like tiny skeletons. Dark, intricate, nothing like Fendi's polished Roman classicism.
The family let her keep her own label. They also gave her the jewellery atelier.
What she brought to Fendi was a willingness to make the house look at itself differently. The Peekaboo bag, introduced in 2008, became one of the maison's most successful silhouettes — a structured, top-handle design with an interior lining visible through the opening, often in contrasting leather or fur. Delfina's jewellery for Fendi echoed that principle: pieces that revealed their construction, chains that wrapped around the wrist and left the clasp exposed, rings that sat between two fingers instead of on one.
She was not trying to soften the house. She was trying to make it younger without making it casual, which is a narrow path. Fendi had always been a house of craft, of materials worked to a level of finish that required a certain income to appreciate. Delfina understood that the customer was changing — not in taste, necessarily, but in how she wanted to be seen.
A woman buying a Peekaboo in 2010 was not buying discretion. She was buying a bag that announced its facture, that invited you to look inside, that made the lining as important as the shell. Delfina's jewellery worked the same way. You were meant to notice the mechanics.
She has since stepped back from the house to focus on her own studio. But her influence remains in the way Fendi approaches accessories: as objects that can be both architectural and intimate, that can reveal their making without losing their poise.
Adele Casagrande: The First Hand
Adele is the one most people forget. She married Edoardo Fendi in 1925, and together they opened a leather and fur workshop on Via del Plebiscito. She was the one who worked the skins. He managed the shop.
There are not many photographs. The ones that survive show a woman with a severe centre part, dark eyes, hands that look like they knew their way around a paring knife. She was not interested in fashion as spectacle. She was interested in whether a seam would hold, whether a pelt had been stored correctly, whether the customer would return.
When Edoardo died in 1954, Adele kept the business running with her five daughters. This was not a sentimental arrangement. The daughters were put to work — Paola on furs, Anna on leather goods, Franca on customer relations, Carla on sales, Alda on manufacturing. Adele taught them to cut, to stitch, to understand the material before they tried to sell it.
By the time Lagerfeld arrived in 1965, Fendi was still a Roman house, still primarily known for fur coats sold to Roman clients. Adele was in her sixties. She did not speak much during meetings, according to those who were there, but she watched. When Lagerfeld proposed treating fur like fabric — cutting it thin, dyeing it, mixing it with cotton and silk — she did not object. She had spent forty years working skins. She knew what they could take.
Lagerfeld later said, in a 1995 interview with The New York Times, that Adele was the only person at Fendi who truly understood the material. The daughters understood the business. Adele understood the animal.
She died in 1978, the same year Fendi opened its first boutique outside Italy. The house had by then become something she might not have entirely recognised — international, experimental, increasingly concerned with image. But the atelier process, the insistence on hand-finishing, the respect for the skin itself — that was hers.
What Remains
Fendi is now owned by LVMH, Lagerfeld is gone, and fur has become, in many markets, a material one does not wear in public without inviting comment. The house has adapted. The Peekaboo is now available in calf, in canvas, in embossed leather that mimics crocodile without involving a crocodile. The selleria stitch remains.
But the through-line, if there is one, is this: Fendi has always been shaped by women who understood that luxury is not about comfort. It is about precision. Piaggi knew it in her styling. Delfina knew it in her jewellery. Adele knew it in her hands.
The house continues. The muses, as always, move on.
