After Un Percorso di Lavoro: Where Karl Lagerfeld’s Roman Dream Awakens Again

Rome, sometime in the mid-1960s. Morning light streamed through the windows of FENDI’s atelier, illuminating tables scattered with supple leather, exquisite pelts and generations of craftsmanship. 

Into this world walked a young German designer from Paris carrying little more than a portfolio, unwavering confidence and a vision unlike anything the Roman maison had encountered before.

Karl Lagerfeld spoke with remarkable clarity. Elegant, razor-sharp and impossibly charismatic, he unfolded sketch after sketch before Paola, Anna, Franca, Carla and Alda Fendi. The five sisters listened intently. 

Their family’s house—founded in 1925 by Edoardo and Adele Fendi as a modest leather workshop and furrier—had already become synonymous with exceptional Roman leatherwork and luxurious furs. Yet they sensed that tradition alone would never secure immortality.

They recognised it in Lagerfeld almost instantly: possibility.

His appointment would become one of fashion’s most extraordinary creative partnerships, spanning more than five decades until his passing in 2019. Together, they transformed an esteemed family business into one of the world’s defining luxury maisons. 

The playful Double F logo—famously interpreted as “Fun Fur”—challenged conventions surrounding fur craftsmanship. Ready-to-wear collections expanded FENDI’s vocabulary beyond leather goods. Every decade brought another reinvention, proving that heritage flourishes only when it embraces fearless imagination.

Years later, Sylvia Venturini Fendi would reshape the accessories universe with the now-legendary Baguette, turning a handbag into a cultural phenomenon. Even after Lagerfeld’s death, FENDI never ceased evolving, captivating a new generation while remaining unmistakably Roman at heart.

Now, another chapter begins.

Standing within Rome’s Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Maria Grazia Chiuri quietly contemplates a remarkable act of remembrance. She is not simply curating history; she is reopening an unfinished conversation.

For Chiuri, reviving After un percorso di lavoro. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985 is less about nostalgia than presence. The original exhibition, inaugurated in October 1985 inside the very same museum, celebrated the first twenty years of Lagerfeld’s collaboration with FENDI. 

Conceived by Lagerfeld himself, curated by Ida Panicelli and realised by Claudio Lazzarini and Carmela Vigliotti, it was among Italy’s earliest museum exhibitions devoted to a fashion house—an audacious proposition that invited visitors behind the curtain of creation itself.

Remarkably, despite its groundbreaking museographic significance, the exhibition had never been comprehensively studied.

Chiuri decided that had to change.

The addition of one word—After—beautifully reframes the experience. Rather than reconstructing the past as a frozen monument, it proposes an ongoing dialogue between memory and modernity. Fashion, after all, exists in a perpetual present. Every archive becomes tomorrow’s inspiration.

That philosophy permeates every gallery.

Curated by Maria Luisa Frisa, with exhibition design by Lazzarini Pickering Architetti and graphic design by Irene Bacchi and Leonardo Sonnoli, the exhibition faithfully recreates the original narrative while acknowledging the realities of time. 

Where original canvases or fur pieces could no longer be recovered, heritage reproductions seamlessly take their place. The exhibition architecture has likewise been carefully adapted to suit new spaces within the museum while preserving Lagerfeld’s original storytelling.

The result feels astonishingly intimate.

Visitors journey through eight meticulously reconstructed sections—Sample Boards, Kaleidoscope, Design Frameworks, Theater, Comb, Video, Sketches and Computer—each revealing another layer of FENDI’s creative process.

It is less an exhibition than an immersion into the mind of a maison constantly questioning its own possibilities.

The archives themselves become the protagonists.

Twenty-two paper models. Seven preparatory canvases. Fifty sample boards. One hundred and eighty sketches. Twenty-five extraordinary fur creations. Jacques de Bascher’s evocative 1977 film Historie D’Eau. Newly presented interviews with Paola Fendi, Ida Panicelli and Arturo Carlo Quintavalle. 

Extensive contemporary press coverage revisits the spirited debate surrounding fashion’s rightful place within an art museum—questions that remain surprisingly relevant today.

Every object originates from the FENDI Archive or the historical archive of the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, reinforcing the exhibition’s extraordinary authenticity.

Yet perhaps its greatest achievement lies elsewhere.

It quietly reveals that FENDI has never merely produced beautiful objects. It has cultivated ideas.

Ideas about craftsmanship as innovation. About fur transformed from tradition into artistic experimentation. About leather elevated into enduring cultural expression. About Roman elegance continuously reinventing itself without ever surrendering its soul.

Those values continue under Chiuri’s thoughtful stewardship. Her widely praised collections—including her debut Autumn/Winter 2026 Haute Couture presentation—embrace a quietly powerful philosophy often described as “Less I, More We”: celebrating collective creativity, artisanal excellence and shared heritage over individual ego. It feels entirely appropriate that her first major cultural gesture at FENDI looks backwards only to propel the house forward.

There is something deeply moving about witnessing forty-one years collapse into a single afternoon inside these galleries. One begins with Lagerfeld’s youthful sketches and emerges understanding why FENDI remains one of fashion’s most compelling institutions a century after its founding.

After un percorso di lavoro. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985, on view at Rome’s Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea from 10 July to 25 October 2026, is ultimately more than an exhibition. It is a love letter to creative courage, Roman craftsmanship and the enduring dialogue between past and future.

For devoted followers of FENDI—and anyone fascinated by how great fashion houses become enduring cultural landmarks—it is not simply an exhibition to visit.

It is one to experience before its final curtain falls.

*Photos courtesy of FENDI.