London, October 2026
Some trips are research. This one was closer to an apprenticeship. In October we flew to Rome with a single purpose: to stand inside F/KL ’85 at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna and study, as closely as the glass would allow, the working mind of Karl Lagerfeld at Fendi.
A house, five sisters, and a designer who never stopped drawing
Fendi was founded in Rome in 1925. Forty years later, in 1965, the five Fendi sisters invited a young Karl Lagerfeld to work with them, and a collaboration began that would last more than half a century, until his death in 2019. It is often remembered for the double F, said to stand for “Fun Fur”. What is remembered less is the method behind it.
Lagerfeld treated fur the way a tailor treats cloth. He lightened it, shaved it, cut it into stripes and spirals, and set one texture against another until something heavy became graphic, almost architectural. In the rooms of F/KL ’85 you see the result on the plinths: a coat drawn in spirals, a cape that moves like woven straw, a mink cut so cleanly it reads like a single brushstroke.
The room nobody photographs
And yet the pieces were not what stopped us. It was the paper. Behind the garments sat the cartamodelli, the paper patterns of the atelier: hand-numbered panels, pins still in the board, arrows marked verso del pelo, the direction in which the fur must fall. A glove pattern, laid flat, looked like sculpture. One sleeve was labelled simply manica con lavorazione: a sleeve, with workmanship.
Beside them hung the sketches, and on the sketches, the notes, in French and Italian. We read every one we could. A few have stayed with us:
“Two furs, the same colour, or black and white. But above all, opposite textures.” (1972)
“Even in a sensible collection, you need some very short things.” (1971)
“Lagerfeld dreams, and the computer records his designs.” (from a 1985 film storyboard)
That last line was written forty years ago, yet it could describe a brand like ours. FAMRIXY began as an idea about fashion and technology meeting in the same room. Reading it on a gallery wall in Rome felt less like a coincidence and more like permission.
What we took home: the method, not the material
FAMRIXY does not work with fur, and FW26/27 uses none. What we brought back to London was Lagerfeld’s avant-garde attitude: the conviction that a garment is a conversation between surfaces. In his words, an opposition de poils. In ours, the dialogue between a soft, heavyweight knit and the hard brilliance of crystal.
The collection is built on a handful of principles, each one borrowed from what we saw:
- Tonal before loud. Same colour, opposite textures: crystal on ivory, gunmetal on ecru. You notice the design when the light moves, not before.
- The architecture of Rome. The arch, the keystone, the column. Stone, translated into light.
- Dégradé. Lagerfeld wrote the word beside a fox cape in 1970. We use it to let stones thin out across a garment, the way time softens a ruin.
- One red signature. A single red Swarovski stone and a red saddle stitch: our answer to the red pencil codes marked on every sketch we saw.
- Short things. Cropped, boxy silhouettes, because even a sensible collection needs them.
How we design
Every FW26/27 idea begins the way it began in that atelier: on paper. Each design is given its own sheet and a red reference number. We draw the silhouette, mark where every stone will sit, and debate it, sometimes over a single millimetre, because a keystone set slightly off-centre stops being a keystone. Then the sheet goes up on the wall beside the others, and slowly the collection starts to speak to itself.
From there, the work leaves the screen. Crystals are tested on practice cloth before they touch a finished piece. Every embellished garment is washed and worn before we call it finished, and the final details are applied by hand in the UK. It is slower than printing. That is the point.
We are not ready to show the collection yet. But here are a few fragments from the studio wall, deliberately out of focus.
The road to FW26/27
- Week 1 · 27 October to 2 November. Final design review. Sizes and fits confirmed.
- Week 2 · 3 to 9 November. Crystal studies: every placement tested, then washed.
- Week 3 · 10 to 16 November. First fittings and the campaign shoot.
- Week 4 · 17 to 23 November. Final edit. The early-access list opens.
- 24 November 2026, 7pm London. FW26/27 is released.
We went to Rome to learn from a master. We came home with a sketchbook full of questions, and a collection that tries to answer a few of them. FW26/27: inspired by Rome, designed in London.
Sketches, notes and pieces referenced: Karl Lagerfeld for Fendi, as exhibited in F/KL ’85, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Roma. Quotes translated from the original French and Italian by FAMRIXY. FAMRIXY is not affiliated with Fendi.