FENDI Is Reopening a 1985 Exhibition Almost Nobody Got to See the First Time

A fashion exhibition that ran for a few months in 1985 and then vanished from public memory is finally getting a second act. This time, Maria Grazia Chiuri wants everyone to actually see it.

After Steps Through Work. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985 previewed on 9 July at the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, timed to Chiuri’s first haute couture show for FENDI, and opened to the public the following day. It’s reviving the original 1985 show that marked one of the first times a fashion house had been given space inside an Italian art museum. The original was curated by Ida Panicelli, with a layout designed by Lagerfeld himself. It traced the entire process of making fur, from first sketch to finished coat, at a point when Fendi and Lagerfeld were twenty years into what would become a 54-year collaboration, until his death in 2019.

Chiuri, FENDI’s Chief Creative Officer, is bringing it back largely intact with the same eight sections (Sample Boards, Kaleidoscope, Design Frameworks, Theater, Comb, Video, Sketches, Computer), with many of the same pieces and in the same building. Some canvases and furs from 1985 didn’t survive, so the show uses heritage reproductions in their place. New curator Maria Luisa Frisa has also had to rework the physical layout, since the show now sits in different rooms of the museum than it did in 1985.