Adele Fendi: The Roman Matriarch Who Built a Fashion Dynasty

Adele Fendi: The Roman Matriarch Who Built a Fashion Dynasty

Before the double F became one of fashion's most recognizable monograms, before Karl Lagerfeld turned fur into something light, irreverent and modern, and decades before the Fendi Baguette became an international It bag, there was Adele Casagrande. Born in Rome in 1897, Adele belonged to a generation of women for whom running a luxury business was hardly an obvious path. Yet the company that would become Fendi grew around her instinct for leather, fur, Roman craftsmanship and family. Her story is not simply the prehistory of a famous logo. It is the story of how a small Roman workshop developed a language of craftsmanship strong enough to survive war, widowhood, generational change and eventually one of fashion's most extraordinary creative partnerships.

Adele Casagrande Before Fendi

The earliest chapter of Adele Fendi's career is slightly more complicated than the neat 1925 founding date printed in most official histories.

Fendi itself dates the establishment of the house to 1925, when Adele Casagrande and Edoardo Fendi founded their fur and leather goods workshop on Via del Plebiscito in Rome.

Other histories trace Adele's independent work back further. The Museo del Marchio Italiano records that Adele opened a leather and fur shop with an attached workshop on Via del Plebiscito in 1918, before her marriage to Edoardo.

That distinction matters.

If the earlier account is accepted, Fendi's history did not begin simply with a married couple opening a boutique. It began with a young Roman woman entering the leather and fur trade on her own.

What can be stated securely is that by 1925 Adele and Edoardo Fendi were operating the business together, and the Fendi name was attached to the enterprise. The boutique combined handbags and leather goods with a fur workshop, establishing the two crafts that would define the house for decades.