Fendi aujourd'hui : où en est la maison
The Baguette turned twenty-five last year, and Fendi marked it with what felt like a concession: a re-edition series, a party at Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, and a campaign that leaned heavily on archive footage. For a house that spent two decades insisting it was never nostalgic, the gesture read differently. Not desperate — Fendi doesn't do desperate — but aware. Aware that the bag had become bigger than any single season, and that Kim Jones, now six years into his tenure as artistic director of womenswear and couture, was still working in the long shadow of Karl Lagerfeld and Silvia Venturini Fendi.
The question isn't whether Fendi is relevant. The numbers say it is. LVMH doesn't break out individual brand performance, but analysts peg Fendi's annual revenue somewhere north of €1.5 billion, with leather goods accounting for roughly sixty percent. The Peekaboo still moves. The First still moves. The problem — if you can call it that — is one of temperature. Fendi has lost some of its bite. Where it once felt like the sharpest house in Rome, it now reads as the most reliable. That's not an insult, but it's not the compliment it would have been in 2005.
The Roman Exception
Fendi was founded in 1925 as a leather and fur atelier on Via del Plebiscito, and it stayed a family business longer than almost any other house at its scale. Adele Casagrande opened the workshop; her husband Edoardo Fendi gave it his name. Their five daughters — Paola, Anna, Franca, Carla, Alda — ran it through the postwar decades with the kind of operational discipline that doesn't make for good copy but does make for solvency. In 1965, they hired a twenty-seven-year-old Karl Lagerfeld to design furs. He stayed for fifty-four years.
That longevity is unusual, but what's more unusual is that it worked. Lagerfeld gave Fendi a vocabulary — the double-F logo in 1965, the Baguette in 1997, the Peekaboo in 2008 — and Silvia Venturini Fendi, who joined in 1994 and has led accessories and menswear ever since, made sure the house didn't drift into pure concept. She kept one hand on the atelier. When Lagerfeld died in February 2019, the question wasn't whether Fendi could survive without him. It was whether it could stay interesting.
LVMH, which took full control in 2001, answered by splitting the role. Kim Jones took womenswear and couture. Silvia stayed on accessories and menswear. Delfina Delettrez Fendi, fourth generation, continues to design jewellery. It's a structure that signals continuity, but also a certain caution. No single vision. No single risk.
The Jones Era, Measured
Jones arrived from Dior Men with a reputation for collaboration-driven collections and an ability to move product without alienating the front row. His first Fendi show, for spring 2021, was a couture presentation filmed inside Palazzo della Civiltà. It featured organza in sand tones, tailoring with an almost Miyake-like volume, and fur worked so light it read as gauze. The reviews were warm. The clothes were pretty. But pretty wasn't what Fendi had been.
Under Lagerfeld, Fendi shows were events you had to metabolise. He'd send out a shearling coat in July, a swimsuit in mink, a bag shaped like a baked potato. Some of it was wearable. Some of it was Karl proving he could. The tension between those two modes — atelier and absurdity — kept the house from feeling safe. Jones, by contrast, is deeply, almost constitutionally, wearable. His Fendi is softer, more considered, more concerned with how a woman might actually dress. Which is a reasonable concern. It's also a flattening one.
His collaborations have done some of the work Lagerfeld used to do alone. The Fendi x Versace swap in 2021 — 'Fendace' — generated press, memes, and sell-through. The Marc Jacobs collaboration for spring 2023 felt more like fan service, but it moved bags. Jones understands the current model: a collection is also content, and content is also commerce. But there's a thinness to it. You watch the show, you see the references — Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf, Roman fountains — and you think: yes, and? The clothes don't argue back.
Where the Money Lives
Fendi's strength has always been leather. Not just in volume, but in the fact that the house actually makes a material case for its prices. The Peekaboo, introduced in 2008 and still the backbone of the leather goods line, is constructed with an internal frame that holds its shape without stiffness. The bag doesn't collapse. It also doesn't scream. That restraint is why it works in Milan, in New York, in Seoul. It's why it still sells.
The Baguette, by contrast, sells for different reasons. It's not about construction. It's about 1999, about Carrie Bradshaw, about the fact that every bag Fendi has made since has been measured against it. The twenty-fifth anniversary editions last year were smart business — limited runs, high margins, built-in demand. But they also underscored a problem. Fendi keeps returning to its own past because the present hasn't produced an equivalent.
Silvia's work in accessories remains the most consistent part of the house. The First bag, the Fendigraphy, the Sunshine tote — all functional, all desirable, none trying to be the next Baguette. She seems to understand that chasing that kind of lightning is a losing game. Better to make bags women actually carry.
The fur business, once central, is now a smaller part of the equation. Fendi hasn't abandoned it — the atelier still produces extraordinary pieces — but the cultural and regulatory climate has shifted. The house has leaned into shearling, into leather treated to mimic fur's softness, into technical fabrics that do some of the same visual work. It's an adjustment, not a crisis. But it does mean that one of Fendi's most distinctive skills is now something it can't fully use.
The Palazzo and the Paradox
Fendi's headquarters, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, is one of the most striking pieces of corporate real estate in fashion. A white travertine monument to Fascist-era rationalism, six rows of arches on each side, visible from half of Rome. The house moved in in 2015, and the building has since become shorthand for Fendi itself: grand, severe, Roman, expensive to maintain.
It's also, increasingly, a venue. Fashion shows, exhibitions, parties, the kind of activations that fill Instagram and justify the rent. The Palazzo is beautiful. But there's something about using a building that monumental as a backdrop that flattens whatever happens inside it. The architecture wins. The clothes become props.
That's the paradox Fendi is managing now. It has the history, the atelier, the revenue, the real estate. What it doesn't have is the feeling that it's driving the conversation. It's participating. It's producing. But the last time Fendi felt like it was setting the terms was probably 2013, when Lagerfeld opened the Trevi Fountain show with models walking on water. Literally. He built a plexiglass runway over the fountain, and for ten minutes, Fendi owned Rome.
Jones hasn't tried to own anything. He's tried to be respectful, to honour the house, to make clothes women want. And he's succeeded at that. But Fendi wasn't built on wanting to be wanted. It was built on making you look twice, making you argue, making you wonder if Karl had finally lost it or if you just weren't keeping up.
The house is in no danger. The bags sell. The shows happen. The Palazzo gleams. But somewhere between the archive and the atelier, Fendi has become the kind of house that throws a party for a twenty-five-year-old bag and calls it forward motion.
