A CENTURY FITS IN A SILHOUETTE
how Fendi, Schiaparelli, and Patou metabolise 100+ years of institutional memory into present-tense design.
On heritage houses, the politics of the long view, and what it costs to remember in public.
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The first thing Silvia Venturini Fendi said when she sat down with Alexander Fury for AnOther's autumn-winter 2025 cover story was that she did not want to look back. Fendi was turning a hundred. The pressure to look back was structural. The advertising had already been booked, the trade press was already filing centenary features, and there was a temptation, presumably, to do the obvious thing and dive into the vault.
She did not. Or rather she did, but on her own terms. Fendi 100, as Venturini Fendi described the project, was about personal memory rather than archival rehearsal, real or imagined. The phrase was generous to itself in a way we found instructive. It admitted that what a house remembers about itself is partly invented, and that invention is not the opposite of fidelity.
Heritage houses are in a strange position right now. The luxury market has spent a decade discovering that history is the most defensible moat. Logos can be copied, silhouettes can be copied, and even the precise grain of a leather can be copied. What cannot be copied is the unbroken hundred-year line from one workshop to the next workshop to the workshop the present creative director walks into on a Monday morning. So the houses with that line have started leaning on it, with some of them now leaning so heavily that the line itself is starting to bow.
The problem with leaning on history as a marketing surface is that the surface gets thin. Reissue something often enough and the original loses weight. Quote a logo enough times and the logo becomes self-parody. The heritage move that worked in 2014, the dust-off and the reissue and the celebration, looks tired by 2026. Everyone has done it. The audience has learned what the trick looks like.
The most interesting houses, this past year, have been working out what comes after the trick. Four projects gave us four answers, and we want to walk through them one at a time, because the differences between them are the actual argument.
I. Fendi, or memory as allegory
The Fendi centenary is the most ambitious case study we have, partly because the house gave itself the most rope. A year of programming. Three discrete formats, runway and design installation and jewellery collection, holding together with a consistent visual position across all three, which is unusual. And, threaded through the campaign, a refusal to call any of it nostalgia.
The autumn-winter 2025 show, titled 1925–2025: Lo Spirito del Tempo, took place at the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. There were models who had walked Fendi in the eighties walking again alongside new faces. The silhouettes were familiar in the way that family resemblance is familiar, which is not the way a reissue is familiar. The shearlings were Fendi shearlings. The hourglass coats were Fendi hourglass coats. But the references were imprecise on purpose. Venturini Fendi described the collection as a distillation rather than a directory. Wallpaper* captured the position cleanly: the show was about what FENDI-ness feels like, not what it looks like in any specific archive piece.
This is the move worth naming. Distillation rather than retrieval. The designer reads the archive deeply enough that she no longer needs to quote from it, and she returns with a feeling instead of a footnote. The clothes are new and the continuity is internal.
Six months later, Conie Vallese's Fonderia Fendi installation at Design Miami pushed the same logic into a different medium. The room Vallese built was small. The press called it a salotto. Inside it were bronze benches, ceramic vases, hand-knotted carpets, screens in Roman leather. The starting point was a 1994 Karl Lagerfeld drawing, Les Cinq Doigts d'une Main, in which the Fendi sisters were rendered as the five fingers of a single hand. Vallese took the drawing literally. Five collaborating ateliers, Fonderia Battaglia and Barovier & Toso and CC-Tapis and Officine Saffi and Fendi's own leather workshops, became the fingers. Each one made an object in a material the others could not work. The room was assembled from the collective.
The press materials placed unusual weight on imperfection. Vallese was quoted, in Wallpaper*'s coverage, on the value of leaving a surface hand-marked. The pieces were not polished out. The bronze kept its imperfections, the ceramic kept its wobble. We are aware that imperfection-as-luxury has become its own genre by 2026, and we would normally roll our eyes at it. The Fendi project earned it, we think, by routing the imperfection through the matriarchal lineage of the house. The hand-marked surface was not a stylistic gesture. It was the trace of which sister made which mark. A different kind of authorship, which is not a phrase we use lightly.
The single-genius designer model that dominated luxury for thirty years is in slow visible retreat. The Fendi centenary did not centre Karl Lagerfeld, despite Lagerfeld having been the longest-tenured creative director in the house's history. It centred the five sisters, whose names are not visible on any garment but whose hands are visible in every Selleria stitch. This is, among other things, a quiet repositioning of who counts as the author of a heritage house. It is more accurate than the celebrity-creative-director model has ever managed, and more usable, because it lets the house keep moving when the creative director changes. Which they always do.
On the Fendi reading a century fits in a hand-marked surface. The hand was there in 1925, the hand is here in 2025, and the medium through which it keeps working is memory.
II. The Palais Galliera, or memory as technique
The Palais Galliera spent the back half of 2025 mounting an exhibition called Weaving, Embroidering, Embellishing: The Crafts and Trades of Fashion. It opened in December and runs until October 2026. The curator, Émilie Hammen, framed it as the first part of a trilogy on savoir-faire. There were more than three hundred and fifty objects on view, drawn from Galliera's holdings, from partner ateliers, and from contemporary commissions made for the show.
The framing decision Hammen made, and which Sortiraparis and CoutureNotebook both caught, was to put the artisans on the wall text and the designers in the footnotes. Lesage, the embroidery house. Hurel, the lace specialist. Baqué Molinié, the flower atelier. Aurélia Leblanc, a young weaver. These are names known inside fashion and almost unknown outside it, and the exhibition argued that they should be the names known outside it too.
This is a structural argument disguised as a curatorial one. What Hammen put on display was that the continuity of a couture house is not the creative director. It is the workshop the couture house sends its sketches to. The artisans are the actual archive. The designer changes every five to seven years. The embroiderer has been at her frame for thirty. When a Schiaparelli show in 2024 looks like a Schiaparelli show in 1937, what produces the resemblance is not Daniel Roseberry's eye. It is the bead. The exact bead, the exact thread, the exact woman who has been beading exactly this kind of bird since 1989.
The floral motif was the exhibition's connecting thread. A single decorative idea traced across two and a half centuries of dress, refusing to die. Eighteenth-century silk brocade, nineteenth-century broderie anglaise, twentieth-century printed crêpe, twenty-first-century 3D-printed petals applied by Hurel by hand because no machine has been built that can place them at the right angle. The flower comes back across the centuries while the hands placing it keep changing.
What this argues for, when you read the show against contemporary heritage marketing, is a humbler model of continuity than the heritage industry usually gives itself. The heritage marketing model says: we are Chanel and we have always been Chanel. The Galliera model says: there is no we, there is a stitch, and the stitch has been passed from hand to hand for two hundred and fifty years, and the brand on top of the stitch is the part of the operation that changes most often.
If you read the show as a polemic, which it lightly is, the polemic is that the workshop is the real archive and also the most precarious one. Ateliers close. Apprentices stop apprenticing. A single retirement can sever a hundred-year chain. The Galliera exhibition, on this reading, is an emergency notice politely formatted as a fashion exhibition. We have noticed, it says, that the most important part of this industry is the part nobody can see. We are showing it to you while we still can.
On the Galliera reading a century fits in a stitch, and the stitch is older than the house wearing it.
III. MoMu, or memory as pedagogy
Across the border in Antwerp, MoMu opened The Antwerp Six in early 2026, and Sarah Mower flew over for Vogue. Her piece is one of the better short reads on heritage and education we have come across this year, and it is short because she trusted the reader to feel the argument without it being made explicit.
The Antwerp Six are by now the canonical example of a fashion movement that came out of a school. Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene, Marina Yee. The Royal Academy class of 1980 and 1981. They debuted as a group at the British Designer Show in London in 1986 because no one could pronounce their surnames and they fit better on a van together than separately. The story has been told enough times that it has the feel of folklore.
The MoMu exhibition's contribution was to argue that the story is, in fact, an argument about institutional design. Antwerp produced six globally important designers in one decade. It then produced Raf Simons, Kris Van Assche, Bruno Pieters, Glenn Martens, the next generation, then the generation after that. This is not a coincidence. This is an ecosystem. The Royal Academy, MoMu, the city government's tolerance for creative tax codes, the cluster of small textile suppliers and pattern makers within an hour's drive, the absence of a celebrity culture that would distract a young designer from making mistakes for four years. All of it. The Six did not happen. They were structured into existence by a system that had decided, before they arrived, that radical design education was worth subsidising.
The exhibition included student work. Letters between teachers and students. Photographs of degree shows. The press dossier that accompanied the show in 1986. The contention was that these documents, treated correctly, were as important as the finished collections. They were the documentation of how a creative ecosystem builds itself, and that documentation could in theory be copied. Other cities could do what Antwerp did. They would have to be willing to subsidise art schools for forty years before seeing returns, which is something most cities are not willing to do.
On the MoMu reading a century fits in a school. The teachers are the curators, the students are both the holdings and the future acquisitions, and the catalogue is the syllabus.
IV. The Met, or memory as authority
We come finally to Costume Art, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in May 2026 and which we wrote about briefly in this issue's cover feature. The exhibition is the inaugural project of the Costume Institute's new permanent galleries, nearly twelve thousand square feet adjacent to the Great Hall. The premise, in Andrew Bolton's framing, is that the dressed body is the connective tissue of the Met. Fashion is no longer a satellite, it is the centre.
The exhibition organises its argument into thirteen body typologies. Naked. Classical. Corpulent. Disabled. Aging. Pregnant. Anatomical. Mortal. And five others. Each gallery pairs garments from the Costume Institute with works from the Met's other collecting areas. A Chanel evening gown against a Greek kore. A Thom Browne suit against a David. A Maison Margiela couture piece against a Goya.
The strongest part of the show is its structural claim. The dressed body is, in fact, the connective tissue. The pairings prove the point. A figure painted in 1640 wore something. A statue carved in 480 BC wore something. The body in art has always been a clothed body, and the museum has been pretending, for two hundred and fifty years, that this was an aesthetic accident rather than a constitutive fact. Costume Art corrects the pretence, and that is a meaningful curatorial achievement.
The weakest part of the show is its taxonomy. The body typologies, as labels, do work that the show is not always willing to do underneath them. "Corpulent Body" is the most discussed example. Activists asked for the word fat. The Costume Institute declined. The institution's defence, that corpulent is more historical, is technically defensible and politically incoherent. The word fat is also historical. The institution chose the longer word because the longer word feels more like a museum and less like a body. The activists were not asking for a slang term. They were asking for a refusal to euphemise.
This matters because the typology is the archive. What the museum chooses to call a body becomes the entry under which the body is filed. Five years from now, when a graduate student is writing a dissertation on early-twenty-first-century museum politics of the body, "Corpulent Body" will be the search term. The euphemism will outlive the controversy.
The exhibition's other curatorial gesture, the mirrored faces by the artist Samar Hejazi, intervenes at the level of the viewer rather than the wall text. The mannequins do not have faces. They have mirrors where faces would be. The visitor approaches a mannequin and finds, in the place of the face, herself. This has been read, in the institutional press, as an invitation to self-recognition. It can also be read as a problem. The mirror tells the visitor that the missing face is her own face. The substitution is not neutral. It folds the visitor's body into the typology she is being asked to examine. If the typology is "Aging" or "Disabled" or "Corpulent," the mirror tells her that her body belongs to this category, or could belong to it, or has belonged to it. The framing is intimate, and also, depending on the visitor, invasive. We have gone back and forth on whether Hejazi's gesture is the smartest or most uncomfortable thing in the show. Probably it is both, and that may be the point.
The question of who gets to write the category is the question Costume Art declines to answer, and the silence on that question is the show's central problem.
V. Four models, one decision
We have walked through four heritage projects of unusual ambition: Fendi's centenary as memory-as-allegory, the Palais Galliera as memory-as-technique, MoMu as memory-as-pedagogy, and the Met as memory-as-authority. We are aware that framing them as a tidy quartet is itself a kind of fiction. Real institutions are messier than their press materials, and so are essays about them.
The reason for the walk is the decision the rest of fashion now has to make. Heritage is not a marketing surface anymore. The audience has caught on. The reissue has stopped working. What replaces the reissue is the question.
Our reading, at the end of this issue's research period, is that the houses and institutions doing the most interesting work are the ones who have stopped treating the archive as a holding and started treating it as a method. Fendi commissions new objects in heritage materials. The Palais Galliera centres the workshop rather than the studio. MoMu argues that the school is the archive. These are operational moves. The Met is the counter-example, the most institutionally powerful project of the year and the one most exposed to the criticism that its archive is being built on the back of euphemism rather than reckoning.
The question for a house turning a hundred in 2027 or 2028 or 2030, and there will be many of them because the early twentieth century was an active period for European fashion, is what model to use. The reissue model is exhausted. The single-genius model is in retreat. The body-typology model has begun, visibly, to attract dissent. What remains is the workshop model and the lineage model and the pedagogy model, the methods that admit in their structure that a house is more like a system than a person, and that the system keeps producing because it was built to keep producing.
A century fits in a silhouette only when the silhouette is the trace of something the system still knows how to make. Otherwise the silhouette is a quotation, and quotations, in our experience, do not age well.
The heritage move that will define the rest of the decade is the one that finds the referent and keeps it moving. Memory as method. The hand still on the frame. The flower still being placed by Hurel one petal at a time, because the machine that can do it correctly has not yet been built. A century is not a long time on this reading. It is a working week, repeated five thousand times, by the people whose names are still not on the dress.
Essay, Saint Magazine, Issue 01: Memory as Method. June 2026.
Primary sources: Alexander Fury, "Silvia Venturini Fendi on a Century of Fendi," AnOther Magazine, autumn-winter 2025. The Authentics, "At Design Miami, Fendi Unveils 'Fonderia Fendi'," 2 December 2025. Sortiraparis and CoutureNotebook on Weaving, Embroidering, Embellishing at the Palais Galliera, December 2025. Sarah Mower, "What Makes Belgium Produce So Many Exceptional Fashion Designers," Vogue, 31 March 2026. W Magazine on Costume Art, 4 May 2026. Wallpaper* and Grazia on Fendi AW25 1925–2025: Lo Spirito del Tempo.
