Fendi celebrates 100 years with all-out runway show at its new Milan HQ

Like most good stories, the fable of Fendi begins with romance. Founded by husband and wife Edoardo and Adele Fendi, the house’s first brick-and-mortar store was opened on Rome’s Via del Plebiscito in 1925. Over the 100 years since, it has remained – in one way or another – a family business, passed down to generations of women who have each played a part in propelling the small leather goods boutique into a global luxury empire.

Last season, Kim Jones’ final collection for the house paid tribute to its remarkable maternal lineage, presenting a series of airy looks that fused Fendi’s ochre-hued codes with the dropped-waist glamour of the 1920s. Before it was revealed, the voice of the 91-year-old Anna Fendi – daughter of Adele – spoke of her time running Fendi with her four sisters, Alda, Paola, Carla, and Franca. ‘Our mother always said: You are like a hand. There are five of you, the fingers. They are different from each other; they are complementary to each other.’

Inside Fendi’s centenary show at Milan Fashion Week

This evening in Milan, the reins were back in the hands of the Fendi family once again as Silvia Venturini Fendi – Anna Fendi’s daughter – presented the house’s A/W 2025 collections for men and women, designing the latter for the first time since Jones’ appointment in 2020 (having been creative director of the house’s menswear collections since 2000, she briefly designed Fendi womenswear after the death of Karl Lagerfeld in 2019). It was fitting that the show also marked the centenary of the house, as well as the opening of Fendi’s newly renovated headquarters on Via Solari, where the show was held.

Beginning theatrically with the twin sons of Silvia’s daughter, Delfina Delettrez Fendi, pulling open a vast set of doors – a recreation of those found on Via Borgognona in Rome, where the Fendi sisters had their atelier – the collection that followed conjured a vision of Cinecittà glamour, ’a sensuality instilled with a Roman rigour,’ as the designer described. Materiality was a focus: a series of ‘fur’ coats – a garment long synonymous with the house – were in fact shearling, using techniques of intarsia, honeycomb and gheronato patchworks to recall the skins of sable, mink and fox. Meanwhile smatterings of crystal and paillette adornment, delicate chantilly lace and pleated taffeta reflected the collection’s celebratory mood.

Taking place in the vast central hall of the renovated space – now double the size of the space in the building previously used to show the house’s runway collections – the cast was a roll-call of the house’s perennial muses, from Penelope Tree to Liya Kebede, Doutzen Kroes, Eva Herzigova and Karen Elson. Meanwhile Sarah Jessica Parker – whose Sex and the City character Carrie Bradshaw propelled the Fendi Baguette bag, designed by Silvia Venturini Fendi in 1997, to international fame – sat front row. She could barely conceal her delight.

After Silvia Venturini Fendi took to the runway to take a rapturous final bow (before the space was cleared to make way for a party complete with pasta and champagne), the designer said that despite the anniversary, she was hesitant of nostalgia. Instead, she was looking towards the future: one which, since Jones’ departure, is currently undefined. ‘I didn’t want to spend too much time dwelling on the physical archives,’ she said. ‘[This collection] is about my personal memories – real or imagined – of what Fendi was, and what Fendi means today.’ As for the Fendi of tomorrow, it remains to be seen – though after today’s show, one wonders if there’s a case for keeping it in the family.

‘This show is so important to me,’ she told Wallpaper*. ‘It is a flashback and a fast forward. It is about five generations of Fendis, from my grandparents’ historic store and atelier to my grandsons opening the doors to the show – a look to the future.’

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