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Silvia Venturini Fendi is stepping down as creative director of the Roman fur and leather goods house which carries her family name, owner LVMH announced on Monday.
The designer will take on the role of honorary president, “continuing to champion the brand worldwide.” A new creative configuration will be announced in “due time,” the company said.
A grandchild of the brand’s founders, Venturini Fendi has overseen the label’s accessories and menswear lines since 1994 — including nearly three decades working closely with the late Karl Lagerfeld, its womenswear creative director for 54 years.
Venturini Fendi added the womenswear collections to her scope for two seasons following Lagerfeld’s death, and then again in 2025 — the brand’s centennial year — stepping in following the exit of Kim Jones last October.
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“These have been truly exciting years, a journey I have walked also in the name of my grandmother Adele, my mother Anna, and her sisters,” Venturini Fendi said in a statement. “My heart turns to Karl, an extraordinary master who granted me the honour of working by his side, teaching me the art of sharing, a defining quality in my family’s history of women, while guiding me to nurture and protect my own creative vision so that I could then fly on my own.”
Venturini Fendi has long championed a uniquely elastic, time-trotting vision of Roman style. Clean, architectural lines — echoing the blend of baroque, neoclassic and modernist structures in the brand’s home city — were tempered by a sensual, at times androgynous, styling and a generous dose of playful embellishments, including patchwork, piping and perforation. Precious furs, leathers and silks were used like any other material, without pretense: Venturini Fendi cut them up and reworked them into everything from evening coats to track jackets to bag charms, highlighting the brand’s blend of luscious materiality and spontaneity.
From the late 1990s, Venturini Fendi worked to perpetuate the family’s creative influence while also driving the company forward commercially as a global luxury brand with new owners: She invented the Baguette in 1997, an opening salvo for fashion’s “it-bag era,” whose runaway sales fuelled investor interest from LVMH and Prada. In 2001, the French group increased its holding to a majority stake.
In 2009, she debuted the Peekaboo bag, which grew into a pillar of the company’s business.
Her final show for the brand, staged Sept. 24 during Milan Fashion Week, mixed notes of romanticism, futurism and sport. Slick, streamlined silhouettes were adorned with whimsical embroideries.
“I never adhered to one single beauty standard and narrowing it all to the cult of beauty is, quite frankly, pointless,” Venturini Fendi said.
Additional reporting by Angelo Flaccavento.
Disclosure: LVMH is part of a group of investors who, together, hold a minority interest in The Business of Fashion. All investors have signed shareholders’ documentation guaranteeing BoF’s complete editorial independence.
