## The Five Sisters and the Furrier's Daughter

The Five Sisters and the Furrier's Daughter

In 1925, Adele Casagrande married Edoardo Fendi and took his name. The leather and fur workshop on Via del Plebiscito, which she had opened the year before, became Fendi. One suspects she understood the acoustics of Roman commerce — a single syllable, two hard consonants, easy to remember when you needed a saddle repaired or a coat relined. What she could not have anticipated was that the name would still be in use a century later, attached to objects that have little to do with harness work and everything to do with a particular strain of postwar Italian ambition.

Adele and Edoardo had five daughters: Paola, Anna, Franca, Carla, and Alda. All five entered the business. By the early 1950s, the workshop had expanded into ready-to-wear and a more visible grade of fur — mink, sable, the pelts that signalled arrival rather than utility. The sisters divided responsibilities along temperamental lines. Paola oversaw leather goods. Anna managed furs. Franca took on customer relations. Carla handled production. Alda, the youngest, ran sales. It was a structure born of necessity — five heirs, one business, no option to fragment — but it worked because each sister occupied her own domain and stayed there.

The atelier in those years was still a Roman concern, not yet a global one. Clients came in person. Fittings took weeks. The work was meticulous but not, in the contemporary sense, conceptual. Fendi made coats that kept you warm and bags that held your things. The leap from that pragmatism to what the house became in the 1960s required an outside force, and it arrived in 1965 in the form of Karl Lagerfeld.

The Arrival of Karl

Lagerfeld was twenty-two when the sisters hired him. He had won the coat category at the International Wool Secretariat competition in 1954, worked briefly at Balmain and Patou, and was looking for a project that would allow him more latitude than the Paris houses permitted. Fendi offered that. The sisters wanted to modernise their fur line without losing the craft that justified the price, and Lagerfeld, who had opinions about everything and the technical skill to execute most of them, seemed capable of the task.

What he did, in practical terms, was treat fur as fabric. He shaved mink to the weight of jersey. He intarsia'd strips of sable into geometric patterns. He dyed pelts in colours — apricot, violet, slate — that had no correlation to anything found in nature. The technique was called facture légère, and it required a level of precision that the atelier had not previously needed. A furrier working in the traditional mode could hide a seam under volume. Lagerfeld's designs had no volume to spare. Every stitch showed.

The collaboration lasted fifty-four years, until Lagerfeld's death in 2019. That longevity is worth pausing over. Designers and houses part ways for any number of reasons — ego, exhaustion, a shift in ownership that makes the relationship untenable. Fendi and Lagerfeld stayed together because the arrangement was, in a structural sense, clean. He was not an owner. The sisters retained control of the business, and later their children did. Lagerfeld designed. He was prolific, uninterested in equity, and content to let someone else manage the ledger. It was, by the standards of fashion, an oddly functional marriage.

The Baguette and What Followed

In 1997, Silvia Venturini Fendi — daughter of Anna, third generation, trained in the atelier since adolescence — designed a small shoulder bag with a short strap meant to tuck under the arm like a loaf of bread. She called it the Baguette. The name was literal, the construction less so. The bag came in hundreds of variations: embroidered, beaded, fur-panelled, sequinned. It was compact, impractical for anything beyond a wallet and keys, and became one of the most commercially successful accessories of the late 1990s.

The Baguette's success had less to do with function than with timing. It arrived at the moment when bags began to operate as signifiers independent of the rest of an outfit — when carrying a recognisable shape mattered more than whether it matched your shoes. Fendi leaned into that. The house released new Baguette variants seasonally, sometimes weekly. Customers collected them. The bag became a plot point on Sex and the City, which helped, though one suspects it would have succeeded regardless. The shape was distinct. The logo, a pair of mirrored Fs designed by Lagerfeld in the 1960s, was legible from across a room.

The Baguette established a template: small, logo-forward, endlessly variable. It is a template Fendi still follows, though the house has since added other silhouettes — the Peekaboo in 2008, the Kan I in 2016 — each engineered for similar ends. Make it recognisable, make it in multiples, make it something a customer might want to own in more than one finish.

What Remains

Fendi is no longer a family business in the operational sense. LVMH acquired a stake in 1999 and took full control in 2001. The sisters, by then in their sixties and seventies, stepped back. Silvia Venturini Fendi stayed on as artistic director of accessories and menswear. Her daughter, Delfina Delettrez Fendi, runs a jewellery line under her own name but maintains ties to the house. The structure is dynastic in branding, corporate in fact.

The question of what remains is therefore not about bloodline but about method. Does the house still operate according to principles established in 1925, or has it become something else entirely? The answer, predictably, is both. The atelier still produces fur and leather goods using techniques that would be recognisable to Adele Casagrande. Saddle stitch, hand-finished edges, the slow accumulation of hours that justifies a four-figure price. At the same time, Fendi releases logo sweatshirts, nylon belt bags, and collaborations with streetwear brands — objects that have nothing to do with atelier craft and everything to do with moving units.

This is not a contradiction so much as a bifurcation. The house operates on two tracks: one for clients who want a Peekaboo in calf leather and will wait twelve weeks for it, another for customers who want the logo and want it now. Both tracks generate revenue. Both are, in their way, authentic expressions of what Fendi has become. Whether that duality is sustainable is a question the house will spend the next decade answering.

What one can say with certainty is that the name still works. Fendi. Two syllables, hard consonants, easy to remember. Adele Casagrande understood that in 1925, and the principle holds. The rest — the furs, the bags, the fifty-four-year collaboration with a German polymath — came after. But the name came first, and it remains.