The workroom on Via del Plebiscito, as it stood in 1925, was not grand
The workroom on Via del Plebiscito, as it stood in 1925, was not grand. Adele Casagrande ran it with her husband Edoardo Fendi, who lent his name to the enterprise but contributed little else of note. She worked fur and leather — repair jobs, mostly, with the occasional bespoke commission when a client wandered in from the street. The space smelled of tanning solution and camphor. There was no atelier in the romantic sense, no lineage to invoke. Just a woman with a pair of shears and a commercial instinct sharp enough to turn pelts into profit.
By the time Adele's five daughters — Paola, Anna, Franca, Carla, Alda — took over in the mid-1940s, Fendi had become a modest family concern with a reputation for quality furs. The sisters divided responsibilities with ruthless efficiency: one handled design, another production, a third managed the books. They were not visionaries in the couture mould. They were pragmatists who understood that Roman society wanted fur coats, and that those coats needed to be lighter, more wearable, less funereal than what the northern houses were turning out.
The breakthrough, such as it was, arrived in 1965. Karl Lagerfeld, then twenty-something and already opinionated, walked into the Fendi atelier as a consultant. He would remain there, in one capacity or another, for fifty-four years. His early work for the house involved techniques that sound unremarkable now but registered as minor heresy at the time: intarsia inlays, fur treated to resemble fabric, skins dyed in colours no mink had ever grown. The famous double-F logo — Fun Furs, as the story goes, though Lagerfeld himself later claimed it stood for nothing in particular — appeared in 1965, hand-sketched in under a minute.
What Lagerfeld understood, and what the sisters encouraged, was that fur need not signify dowager severity. It could be playful. A squirrel bolero. A fox stole in acid yellow. Coats constructed like patchwork quilts, each panel a different pelt, the whole garment as light as a cardigan. This was not couture in the Parisian sense — no one mistook a Fendi fur for a Balenciaga gazar coat — but it was craft of a high order, and it sold.
Fendi's leather goods came later, and almost by accident. In the 1970s, as fur began its long, contested decline in polite society, the house needed another pillar. The Baguette, introduced in 1997, became that pillar. Silvia Venturini Fendi, granddaughter of Adele, designed it as a small underarm bag meant to be carried like a loaf of bread. The proportions were odd — too small for practicality, too structured for evening — but the oddness worked. Within two years, Fendi was producing the Baguette in over a thousand variations: beaded, embroidered, fur-trimmed, sequined. Sex and the City featured one in a mugging scene. The bag became a signifier, which is to say it became expensive.
The question of what remains, after nearly a century, is less straightforward than the house's marketing materials suggest. Fendi is now owned by LVMH, acquired in 2001 for an amount that has never been disclosed but is widely believed to have exceeded $850 million. The family retains a ceremonial presence — Silvia Venturini Fendi still oversees accessories and menswear — but the maison operates as a luxury conglomerate asset, subject to the same growth imperatives as any other LVMH property. The atelier on Via del Plebiscito is long gone, replaced by a glass-and-travertine headquarters in the EUR district that looks like a minor pavilion at a world's fair.
Lagerfeld's death in 2019 severed the last thread connecting Fendi to its postwar identity. His final collection for the house, shown a month before he died, featured fur in nearly every look — a defiant gesture at a moment when most European cities were moving to ban fur sales outright. One could read this as loyalty to craft, or as an old man's stubbornness, or both. Kim Jones, who succeeded him, has taken a different tack. His Fendi is sleeker, more streetwear-adjacent, less interested in the atelier as theatre. The furs remain, but they share runway space with nylon bombers and logo-jacquard sneakers.
What persists, arguably, is a certain Roman attitude toward luxury — less austere than the Milanese houses, less cerebral than the Parisian ones. Fendi has never pretended to be about restraint. The Peekaboo, introduced in 2008, is a doctor's bag that opens to reveal a contrasting lining, often in a colour that could charitably be described as assertive. The house's ready-to-wear collections favour fur trim, oversized proportions, and a kind of louche glamour that photographs well but requires confidence to wear in daylight. This is not clothing for the discreet.
The archive, such as it is, tells a fragmented story. Fendi has produced retrospectives and coffee-table books, but the early decades remain thinly documented. Adele left no sketches, no journals, no interviews. The sisters gave few press statements and avoided the kind of mythologising that other Italian houses — Gucci, for instance — embraced early on. What we know of Fendi's origins comes mostly from corporate hagiography and the occasional aside in Lagerfeld's interviews, neither of which can be taken as gospel.
Still, the bags endure. The Baguette has been reissued in dozens of iterations, each one selling briskly despite — or perhaps because of — its impracticality. The Peekaboo remains a bestseller, particularly in Asia, where the house's more exuberant tendencies find a receptive audience. Fendi's fur business, though diminished, has not disappeared; the house continues to operate one of the few remaining fur ateliers in Europe, staffed by artisans whose average age hovers near sixty. When they retire, one suspects, the atelier will not be replaced.
What remains, then, is less a coherent vision than a collection of signatures: the double-F, the Baguette's proportions, a willingness to treat fur as fabric rather than trophy. Whether that constitutes a legacy or merely a brand identity is a question the house itself seems uninterested in answering. Fendi, after all, is in the business of selling bags, not writing its own history. The former pays considerably better.
