Fendis Fairy Tale

As the house celebrates 90 years, creative director Karl Lagerfeld opens up about working with the Fendi family—the longest collaboration in fashion history. 

- J.J. Martin

As far as fashion fairy tales go, this one’s a doozy. Karl Lagerfeld, the world’s most famous fashion designer, was being heralded for an unprecedented and astonishingly successful streak of 51 years designing for Fendi. The famed Roman luxury label, once a small, family-run business, was celebrating its 90 th anniversary and on a serious global roll. There was fearless expansion happening everywhere, including the fancy new white marble headquarters in the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (a modernist Fascist-era wonder courtesy of Benito Mussolini) and the 17 th -century Palazzo Fendi, replete with a new flagship, a jewel-box boutique hotel that houses a Japanese restaurant and a rooftop bar, and a private VIP apartment.

A party was certainly in order. In July, Fendi threw a fête of fabled proportions, hosting an outdoor haute couture fur fashion show in the famed Trevi Fountain (that’s right, in it), followed by a breathtakingly beautiful dinner for 600 at the Villa Borghese’s Terrazza del Pincio. The biggest coup, perhaps, was Lagerfeld’s clear Plexiglas runway that stretched over the fountain’s pool, allowing each model in the show, led by Kendall Jenner, to stride across as though effortlessly walking on water.

From the international fashion editors who had been whisked by private plane directly from the couture shows in Paris, to celebrities like Kate Hudson, perched in the front row, to the starry-eyed housewives hanging out of their open windows overlooking the piazzas below, the monumental spectacle rendered everyone speechless.