From flashback to fast forward, Silvia Venturini Fendi activates memories playful and profound, celebrating five generations and 100 years of the house of Fendi founded in Rome by her grandparents, Edoardo Fendi and Adele Casagrande Fendi, in 1925.
“Fendi reminds me of the future,” she says, as the Fendi Women’s and Men’s Fall/Winter 2025-2026 Fashion Show ushers in this centenary year with great fanfare.
The new Spazio Fendi in Milan becomes a mirage: revisiting the historic salons of the Fendi boutique and atelier on Via Borgognona in Rome where the five Fendi sisters – Alda, Anna, Carla, Franca and Paola – worked and played.
Born as a purveyor of fine stoles and handbags, the origin story of Fendi is wrought anew by Silvia, reflecting on a century of the House as an exercise in figuration. The collection radiates with ideas of Fendi-ness: where irony and humor mingle with sobriety, and sensuality is instilled with a Roman rigor. Clothes become characters, and characters become their clothes, as the Women’s and Men’s collections are intertwined with sartorial traditions and subversive takes on Italian sophistication.
From the opening silhouette, primal textures trick the eye. A flared coat is worn as a dress – its collar high and waist cinched with a fine gold belt. Once reserved only for the most noble furs, here intarsia, honeycomb and Gheronato patchwork techniques are applied to shearlings that resemble fox, mink and sable, yet are not.
The conceit continues as the hourglass — a nod to infinity — manifests in satin balza skirts, flounced corolla jackets and a rounded sleeve.
Marbled plissé and ribbed knit dresses dissolve into curled lettuce hems, eel and lamb leather patchworks flare in A-line chevron skirts, and raw-cut menswear coats cocoon with a hidden martingale to operatic effect.
Throughout, a crescendo of colors incites the shades of Rome at dusk – laurel and forest green, graphite, chocolate and petrol blue – to the blazing hues of its eternal sunsets in cinnamon and terracotta, bubblegum, buttermilk, scarlet and dusty rose.
Considering 100 years of style, the prowess of Fendi tailoring achieves its apex in bracelet-sleeve blazers and stovepipe flares, as boiled wool coats are deconstructed with a prominent satin revers. Trench coats, an ode to Italian power-dressing, are cut large in lambskin or with a scarf collar in plissé taffeta, as men’s cabans appear in powdery shades of compact wool.