Fendi

Leather and Fur in Rome

Fendi's specialisms were set at its beginning. Adele Casagrande's 1918 shop in Via del Plebiscito in central Rome sold leather and fur — two materials that demand workshop skill: leather goods stand or fall on cutting, stitching and finish, and fur requires selection, matching and handling of skins before a garment can be made at all. Renamed Fendi in 1925 after Adele's marriage to Edoardo Fendi, the business prospered and added a Via Piave shop in 1932. The brand remains most famous for its selection of shoes and furs, a reputation rooted in those material crafts, and leather goods later carried the name abroad: Bloomingdale's president Marvin Traub discovered Fendi's leather goods and introduced them to the United States, after which other outlets followed, leading to a large store on New York's Fifth Avenue and boutiques around the world, including American stores in New York, Bal Harbour and the Galleria in Houston.

Five Sisters and a Designer

The second generation made Fendi a family firm in the fullest sense: from 1946, all five daughters — Paola, Carla, Anna, Franca and Alda — came to work for the company. In 1965 the family sealed its partnership with German designer Karl Lagerfeld, a pairing that proved fortunate for both sides. Lagerfeld's inverted FF logo gave Fendi a compact, repeatable mark fit for hardware, linings and leather goods, and the team then took on fur itself. Their achievement was technical as much as visual: inventing new ways of working with fur — tanning, dying and treating it, and turning previously unused skins into fashionable garments — until what had been a precious but stiff and heavy garment became light, soft, easy to wear and flattering.

From Couture Fur to Ready-to-Wear

The results appeared quickly. Fendi presented its first couture fur collection, designed by Lagerfeld, in 1966, to immediate success with foreign buyers, and its first ready-to-wear fur collection at Palazzo Pitti in Florence in 1969, bringing evolving techniques and imaginative designs to lower-priced furs without sacrificing quality. When the sisters could not find the fabric clothes they wanted to show under the furs, the ready-to-wear clothing line was born, again successfully, followed by the younger Fendissime line, perfume and other licenses — the classic path by which a specialist house becomes a full fashion brand.

That progression matters for understanding Fendi's range today in the terms given here: shoes and furs remain the famous selection, leather goods are the craft that opened the American market, and ready-to-wear, the Fendissime line, perfume and licenses are the layers added once the Roman workshop had become an international house with boutiques in the world's major shopping cities, each new category building directly on the fur and leather craftsmanship that founded the house in Rome.