Fendi Revives Its Most Historic Exhibition 40 Years After Karl Lagerfeld Designed It

In October 1985, something unprecedented happened in Italy: a fashion brand walked into a museum. The exhibition Steps Through Work. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985, inaugurated at the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, celebrated the first twenty years of collaboration between Fendi and Karl Lagerfeld — and in doing so, became one of the first exhibitions dedicated to a fashion house to enter an Italian museum. Now, forty years later, Fendi is bringing it back with the Fendi Karl Lagerfeld exhibition Rome 2026.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fendi

Conceived by Fendi Chief Creative Officer Maria Grazia Chiuri, After Steps Through Work. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985 reopens at the same institution this summer, running from July 10 through October 25, 2026. The word “After” says everything about the intention: this is not a recreation, and not a replica. It is a recontextualization — a critical look at what that exhibition meant in 1985, what it means now, and what it might still generate.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fendi

The original exhibition was curated by Ida Panicelli, with a layout conceived by Lagerfeld himself and realized by Claudio Lazzarini and Carmela Vigliotti. It walked visitors through the full arc of the creative process — from conception to design to production in fur — through a narrative sequence Lagerfeld defined himself, one that highlighted the radical experimentation that had transformed the fur object into something entirely new. It was a document of a creative partnership unlike any other in fashion.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fendi

The 2026 edition, curated by Maria Luisa Frisa with exhibition design by Lazzarini Pickering Architetti and graphic design by Irene Bacchi and Leonardo Sonnoli, draws from both the Fendi archive and the GNAMC historical archive. It includes 22 paper models, 7 preparatory canvases, 50 sample boards, 180 sketches, 25 furs, the 1977 film Histoire D’Eau directed by Jacques de Bascher, and interviews with Paola Fendi, Ida Panicelli, and Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, alongside press coverage from the original 1985 showing. Where original objects could not be recovered, heritage reproductions stand in — an honest acknowledgment that reactivating history is always, to some degree, a reconstruction.

The exhibition is organized across eight sections: Sample Boards, Kaleidoscope, Design Frameworks, Theater, Comb, Video, Sketches, and Computer. It closes with a press review from 1985 — an opportunity to revisit the conversation the original exhibition provoked around fashion’s place in the museum, a conversation that, as Chiuri has noted, remains largely unresolved in Italy today.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fendi

What Chiuri has understood in reviving this exhibition is something fashion rarely admits: that the most important work is worth looking at twice. Lagerfeld’s collaboration with Fendi lasted until his passing in 2019 — 54 years, one of the longest and most transformative partnerships in the history of the industry. After Steps Through Work is an invitation to understand why.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fendi

After Steps Through Work. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985 is on view at the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Viale delle Belle Arti 131, Rome, from July 10 through October 25, 2026. Open Tuesday through Sunday, 9AM–7PM.

For more from Haute Living’s Fendi coverage, explore Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Couture Fall/Winter 2026 debut in Rome and Fendi 100: A Century of Roman Reverie.