“He used to call me ‘la petite fille triste,’” remembered Silvia Venturini Fendi in an emotional backstage scene at the elegiac Fendi show, the last designed by the late Karl Lagerfeld, whom she first met when she was four years old. “Now is not the time to be sad,” she added, noting that Lagerfeld supervised every look in the focused collection that revealed what she called “those facets of him”—the signatures that he had embedded into the brand’s DNA since he first met the quintet of Fendi sisters, including Venturini Fendi’s mother, Anna, in Rome in 1965.
Those signature touches included the stiff, high Edwardian collars that Lagerfeld himself wore and riffs on the scissor-sharp tailoring with geometric seams that he returned to every season. This time, those seams defined a strong, sharp pagoda shoulder line or the A-line panels in a perfectly fitted coat. There was also a play of layers and translucency that included laser-perforated “fishnet” leather. The interlinked double F logo (dubbed “Karligraphy”) that Lagerfeld himself invented in 1981 was reimagined in the copperplate font of his own handwriting and woven into hosiery or used as an intarsia on shearling. (The classic Fendi brown-and-beige stripe, worked in shearling for an overscale frame-handle bag, was one of the accessory hits of the collection.)
The furs, a category that Lagerfeld redefined with soaring imagination and invention as a seasonless contemporary fashion item for Fendi, included an overscale mink shirt with contrast intarsia suggesting the shadow of the collar and pocket flaps; an amazing tone-on-tone effect of Art Deco palm fronds worked into a black suit with a trim, ’40s silhouette; and a perforated trenchcoat, the soft buff fur punctured to reveal flashes of pale gold beneath the surface. “The last touch was the scarf,” said Venturini Fendi, referring to the unexpected flourish of broad ribbon threaded as a belt in back, ends fluttering, on many of the dresses and coats, which lent a touch of disheveled romance to the clear-cut silhouettes.
Lagerfeld’s longtime music collaborator Michel Gaubert, working with Ryan Aguilar, set the show to a poignant biographical soundtrack that began with Lou Reed and John Cale’s “Small Town,” a brilliant ode to Andy Warhol (“No Michelangelo came out of Pittsburgh,”) via Stravinsky and Ornella Vanoni’s lament “Sono Triste,” and ended in a finale file-past to David Bowie’s “Heroes”—paralleling Lagerfeld’s own remarkable arc from his childhood in Hamburg to his hard-earned position as an internationally recognized and revered cultural icon. An icon, let it be said, who never once contemplated retiring from the job that began seven decades ago as a studio assistant with the thoroughly Parisian couturier Pierre Balmain.
In the weeks before his death, Venturini Fendi remembered, Lagerfeld’s mantra remained: “I have to work on my collections.” During the fittings, he would interrupt his stream-of-consciousness observations and bon mots to politely admonish the tailors and dressmakers, explaining that the garment in front of him was not exactly like his sketch; “I’m sorry,” he would say, “but it’s a millimeter off just there . . .”
As Gigi Hadid closed the show in her diaphanous buttercup-yellow dress, the crowd rose to their feet—just in time for a short movie clip of Karl Lagerfeld, who was asked by filmmaker Loic Prigent to sketch his look the day he arrived in Rome to work for Fendi. Lagerfeld, of course, remembered it perfectly as he sketched with the effortless panache with which he imagined thousands upon thousands of amazing pieces of clothing. In this instance, a fedora from Cerruti to cover his long hair, a Norfolk jacket in yellow-and-red English tweed, a printed Lavalliere cravat, French knickerbockers, and dark glasses—a look he described 54 years later as “mauvais gen” [disreputable].
Backstage, Lagerfeld’s longtime collaborators and the models whose careers he had helped nurture were all in tears. “I just feel so lucky I got to meet him and be a part of it,” said Bella Hadid, who, like many other girls, had to fight back her emotions on the runway.
After the traditional viewing of the runway video, Venturini Fendi, thanking her distraught team, punched the air and echoed the words that Lagerfeld repeated after every collection: “And now, the next!”
