Fendi

Fendi began in 1925 when Adele Casagrande and her husband, Edoardo Fendi, opened a fur and leather goods shop on Via del Plebiscito in Rome. Adele was the driving force, and the business was a family affair from the start. After the war, from 1946, the couple's five daughters, Paola, Anna, Franca, Carla and Alda, joined the company one by one, each eventually holding an equal share and each taking charge of a part of the business, from furs to leather goods to sales.

In 1965 the sisters hired a young German designer, Karl Lagerfeld, to modernise their furs. He treated fur as if it were fabric, dyeing, shaving, weaving and lightening it, and he drew the double-F logo, which he said stood for "Fun Fur". His partnership with the family lasted fifty-four years, until his death in 2019, the longest between a designer and a house in modern fashion. Ready-to-wear followed in 1977, and the Zucca monogram, printed on canvas, became a status symbol of the period.

The third generation took the house into a new era. Silvia Venturini Fendi, Anna's daughter, joined in 1994 to design accessories and later menswear, and in 1997 she created the Baguette, a small bag tucked under the arm like a French loaf. It was among the first "It" bags, made in hundreds of versions and famously worn on Sex and the City. Her Peekaboo followed around 2009.

In 1999 Prada and LVMH together bought a controlling stake in the company; LVMH bought out Prada's share in 2001 and gradually took full control. Fendi's spectacles grew with the group's ambitions: a 2007 show on the Great Wall of China, funding for the restoration of the Trevi Fountain, and in 2016 a haute couture show staged on water across the fountain to mark the house's ninetieth anniversary. In 2015 Fendi moved its headquarters to the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, the travertine "square Colosseum" in Rome's EUR district.

After Lagerfeld's death, Silvia Venturini Fendi took charge of womenswear until September 2020, when Kim Jones was named artistic director of couture and womenswear. He left in October 2024, and Venturini Fendi oversaw the collections again until stepping down from her artistic role in September 2025. In October 2025 LVMH appointed Maria Grazia Chiuri, formerly of Dior and, earlier in her career, an accessories designer at Fendi, as chief creative officer. Her first collection, for autumn 2026, was shown in Milan in February 2026. A century on, the house still links its name to the women who made it.