Maria Grazia Chiuri revives Karl Lagerfeld’s Fendi at Rome museum

Maria Grazia Chiuri turned Fendi’s archive into a Roman power move, staging After Un percorso di lavoro. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985. After Steps Through Work inside the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and linking it to her first couture collection for the house, shown on July 9, 2026. The exhibition is on view in Rome from July 10 through October 25, 2026, and it places fashion inside one of Italy’s most serious public art rooms, where cultural authority is the point as much as the clothes.

The gesture reaches back to October 1985, when Fendi and Karl Lagerfeld mounted Un percorso di lavoro. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld at the same museum under the curatorship of Ida Panicelli. Fendi has said that show was one of the first to bring fashion into an Italian museum context, and that history matters here: the house is not simply revisiting a celebrated collaboration, it is restaging the moment when its own language was first granted institutional weight. In Rome, that kind of provenance is a form of luxury all its own.

Fendi says the new exhibition recreates the 1985 presentation as faithfully as possible, but the real intelligence of the project lies in what has been reframed rather than merely repeated. The display is organized into eight sections tracing the creative process from concept to production, with 180 sketches, 25 fur pieces, 22 paper models, seven prototype canvases and 50 sample boards. The emphasis is on making the mechanics visible: the discipline of cut, the patience of iteration, the slow accumulation of decisions that gives a house its signature. Against Chiuri’s couture debut, the archive stops being a static memory and becomes living proof of method.

That is why the museum setting feels so strategic. The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art brings the weight of a major public collection to a house that has long treated Rome as part of its identity, not just its address. Silvia Venturini Fendi has called the bond between Karl Lagerfeld and Fendi fashion’s “longest love story,” and this revival makes that romance legible as business logic too. In a luxury market that prizes heritage, the house that can show its lineage, not just claim it, keeps its history working in the present.