Fendi: The Roman Workshop That Became a House of Craft

The house of Fendi dates its foundation to 1925, when Adele and Edoardo Fendi established a business in Rome. Its first premises combined two trades: a shop selling handbags and a workshop producing fur. From the start, the enterprise was defined by materials and by the knowledge needed to work them, rather than by a single designer's signature.

Before 1925

The house's official chronology begins in 1925, but Italian press accounts trace the story a few years further back. According to Il Post and NSS Magazine, Adele Casagrande opened a small leather and fur workshop on Via del Plebiscito, in the centre of Rome, in 1918. Her marriage to Edoardo Fendi in 1925 gave the business the family name under which it has traded ever since. The distinction is useful for researchers: the founding date that the house uses marks the creation of the Fendi enterprise, while the craft experience behind it is somewhat older.

Two crafts under one roof

Leather goods and fur are related but technically distinct disciplines. A handbag depends on cutting, skiving, stitching and the design of frames, closures and handles. A fur garment depends on the selection and matching of pelts, on how skins are cut and joined, and on an understanding of how fur falls and moves. A business that practised both had to hold two kinds of expertise, and the close relationship between shop and workshop meant that customers' demands could pass directly to the people making the objects.

Early press accounts also connect the house with Roman leather traditions. Il Post records that in the 1930s Fendi introduced a pale yellow sheepskin and drew on Rome's master saddlers for the cutting of leather, the origin of what became the Selleria line. These details belong to the house's formative decades, well before it acquired an international profile.

The five sisters

The next generation shaped the business decisively. Adele and Edoardo's five daughters, Paola, Anna, Franca, Carla and Alda, all entered the company and together took over its management. The house itself refers to "the legendary five Fendi sisters", and their collective role is central to its identity. It complicates the familiar idea of a fashion house as the creation of one individual. In this case, commercial judgement, technical knowledge and family collaboration were shared among several people, each with responsibility for different parts of the business.

Karl Lagerfeld and the reinvention of fur

In 1965 the sisters invited Karl Lagerfeld to work with the house. The collaboration lasted fifty-four years, until his death in 2019, and LVMH describes it as the longest between a designer and a fashion house. According to LVMH, Lagerfeld sketched the five sisters as the five fingers of a hand, an image of a business run by several people working as one.

His work treated fur as a material for experimentation rather than simply as a traditional emblem of luxury. Pelts could be cut, dyed and combined in ways that changed their weight, surface and silhouette. The double-F monogram, which Il Post dates to 1966, became the house's best-known mark from this period. Lagerfeld was not the founder of Fendi, and the distinction matters: he was a creative director working within a family enterprise that already had forty years of material expertise.

The third generation

Continuity within the family remained a feature of the house. In 1992 Silvia Venturini Fendi, of the family's third generation, joined Lagerfeld in the artistic direction; in 1994 she took charge of accessories, and later of menswear. In 1997 she created the Baguette bag. LVMH acquired a stake in Fendi in 2000 and became its majority shareholder in 2001.

Reading Fendi objects

For the historian, the house offers two parallel archives: one of leather goods, and one of fur. Both document changing techniques and changing attitudes, from fur as a mark of status to fur as a field of design, and from handbags as practical accessories to handbags as objects of fashion in their own right.