Bernard Arnault’s LVMH has held the controlling stake in Fendi since 2001, yet the gold cuffs and FF earrings on its runway are still designed by a great-granddaughter of the couple who founded it.
Adele and Edoardo Fendi founded the house in Rome in 1925. It passed to their five daughters and was then sold, in two instalments, to the biggest luxury group in France. A surname that famous rarely stays on the door once the family has banked the proceeds. Even so, the founders’ granddaughter was designing the clothes until the autumn of 2025 and now holds an honorary presidency, and her daughter runs the jewellery. Ownership below means shares, as the companies announced them and the trade press reported them. Family means the Fendis still in the building, and the two lists have not matched since 1999.
LVMH is the controlling owner, and has been since Prada left
On 24 November 2001, LVMH and Prada announced that LVMH would buy Prada’s 25.5 per cent of Fendi. Europa Star’s account of the joint announcement shows that this took LVMH to 51 per cent of the share capital, with the family holding 49. That is the moment the house became, in plain terms, LVMH’s. A company spokesman told JCK the majority took effect at the end of that year. LVMH’s own corporate history, as it appeared in a Fendi Casa release in July 2025, dates the acquisition to 2000 and the majority to 2001, which is slightly tidier than the October 1999 announcement where the whole business began. Large companies, like large families, keep their own calendar.
Before the sale, each of the five Fendi sisters owned a fifth
Paola, Anna, Franca, Carla and Alda were the second generation, and the business was theirs in equal parts: The Fashion Law says each held 20 per cent before the sale. Equal shares make a family tree look admirably symmetrical. According to the same report, Anna, Silvia Venturini Fendi’s mother, was adamant that the sisters keep substantial control. Silvia has since said the sale was very painful for her mother, who had not really wanted to sell. The family was by then large enough to need a seating plan. Silvia once counted it out for an interviewer: five sisters, eleven children and more than thirty grandchildren.
Prada and LVMH first bought in together, after Gucci dropped out
In October 1999, Europa Star reported, the two groups announced an agreement to buy a controlling majority of Fendi through a joint venture in which they held equal stakes. Gucci had already left the bidding. The Fashion Law describes the result as a deal that put control in the hands of Bernard Arnault and Prada’s Patrizio Bertelli while general management stayed with the sisters. In practice the five women went on running a house whose votes now sat in two boardrooms, neither of them in Rome. The buyers had the shares, and the sisters still had the keys.
Prada sold its share to LVMH, and the joint announcement named no price
The joint venture lasted two years. When Prada sold out in November 2001, the announcement gave percentages and no sum. JCK reported that LVMH paid €295m, or US$259.2m, and Italian newspapers had reported much the same at the time. Neither company put its name to a figure. Fashion houses launch a new handbag with more adjectives than LVMH and Prada spent on the transfer of one of Rome’s best-known names. Prada’s exit is why the ownership answer has been short ever since: from 2001 there was one outside owner, and it was LVMH.
LVMH now owns all of Fendi, according to The Fashion Law
The step from majority to everything is the hazy part. The Fashion Law states that, eighteen years after the first deal, LVMH owns 100 per cent of Fendi, though it gives no date or filing for the change. LVMH’s corporate history stops politely at “majority shareholder”. When the Washington Post reported on Silvia Venturini Fendi’s successor, it described Fendi as a house founded by her grandparents and now owned by LVMH, with no qualifier. Neither LVMH nor the family has put a public number on any shares individual Fendis might still hold, and it would be rude to guess.
Fendi’s sales disappear into LVMH’s fashion division
Fendi’s turnover has no line of its own in LVMH’s 2025 results. The nearest figure is Fashion & Leather Goods, which LVMH put at €37,770m in revenue for the year, lower than in 2024. Every house in that column, Fendi included, gives up its own accounts to the group’s totals. Joining a conglomerate means your accounts become a line in somebody else’s. For a family that once sat round a table in Rome counting its own takings, that may be the least romantic consequence of the sale, and also the most permanent.
Silvia Venturini Fendi handed over the designs and kept an honorary presidency
The founders’ granddaughter, Anna’s daughter and the third generation, worked in the house’s artistic direction from the early 1990s alongside Karl Lagerfeld. When Kim Jones left the womenswear in 2024, she took it on as well as the menswear. Her last show, Spring/Summer 2026, went down the runway in Milan on 24 September 2025. Five days later LVMH announced that she was stepping down from creative direction to become honorary president, and Grazia reports that the change took effect on 1 October. It came in a season when houses across the industry were changing designers to revive sales, and LVMH said only that new creative direction would be announced “in due time”. Honorary president is the title a family business gives someone it would very much like to keep at lunch.
Maria Grazia Chiuri, who started under the five sisters, now designs Fendi
On 14 October 2025 Fendi named Chiuri, then 61 and most recently creative director of LVMH’s Dior, as its creative director, and Bernard Arnault called her “one of the greatest creative talents”. She knows the building already. According to Modaes, her statement on taking the job recalled that she began her career under the five sisters, so she arrives as both newcomer and old girl, which in Roman fashion is the best of both. The commercial side had changed first, when LVMH made Ramon Ros chief executive in April 2025. Within a year the house had a new chief executive and a new designer, and neither of them is called Fendi. Her first collection was scheduled for Milan in February 2026.
A Fendi Casa sofa comes from a licence holder owned by Haworth’s Luxury Living Group
Haworth says that since 1 July 2025, Luxury Living Group, part of Haworth Lifestyle, has handled the global production and distribution of Fendi Casa. It took over by buying all of Fashion Furniture Design S.p.A., the company that holds the licence. The name stitched on the cushion belongs to Fendi, which means LVMH, while the company making the sofa belongs to Luxury Living Group. A complaint about a wobbly leg has three possible letterheads, none of them a Fendi’s. If a fashion house is one family’s name rented to the world, furniture is where the rent gets collected.
Delfina Delettrez Fendi, the fourth generation, designs the jewellery
Silvia’s daughter founded her own jewellery brand in 2007, aged 19, following her father, the jeweller Bernard Delettrez, and she still runs it. Kim Jones hired her to design jewellery for Fendi in 2020. She is now its artistic director of jewellery, and in 2023 she produced the house’s first high-jewellery collection since its founding in 1925. At her mother’s final show she made the gold cuffs, the pendants and the FF earrings. She told 10 Magazine that “Jewellery was the only world that wasn’t touched by Fendi”, a pleasing line from a woman with Fendi in her name. The house had to wait almost a century and four generations to have something to say on the subject.
So does the Fendi family still own Fendi?
LVMH holds control, as it has since 2001, and The Fashion Law reports that it now owns the whole house. Any shares a Fendi might still hold have no published number. The family kept the surname over every door and Silvia’s honorary presidency. It also kept a great-granddaughter of the founders, who decides what goes in the small boxes.
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Cover photograph via Hello!; Jérémy Barande via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
