THE
EXHIBITION
Yesterday has gone – Today is going – All we have left is tomorrow – Only the future interests and intrigues me – The curiosity of the unknown is the essence of my professional life, my whole life
Karl Lagerfeld, on the exhibition Steps Through Work. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld
In October 1985, the exhibition Steps Through Work. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld, curated by Ida Panicelli, opened at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. The exhibition design, based on a concept by Karl Lagerfeld, was realized by Claudio Lazzarini and Carmela Vigliotti. Conceived both as a celebration of the first twenty years of the collaboration between Fendi and Karl Lagerfeld, and as a bridge towards the future, the exhibition honored a creative partnership that would continue until the designer’s death in 2019
One of the first exhibitions dedicated to a fashion house to enter a museum in Italy, it not only invited visitors to follow the stages of fur production from conception to design and manufacture, but also revealed, through a narrative sequence devised by Lagerfeld himself, the spirit of experimentation that had radically transformed Fendi’s relationship with fur, generating results that were both unique and revolutionary
Maria Grazia Chiuri’s decision to reenact this exhibition, which, despite its significance from a museographic perspective, has never been the subject of scholarly study, makes it possible to go beyond an account of its conception and meaning. Making it accessible today, both as a whole and in its individual components, means recreating its physical presence and fostering a new, and unpredictable, relationship with the public
To reenact that exhibition today is to honor one of fashion’s most fundamental qualities: its belonging to a perpetual present. It is also an opportunity to interrogate – or to create – new boundaries and new meanings for a project that took place forty years ago. The word After has been added before the original exhibition title to signal the recontextualization of objects and images. The intention is to create something new today in the wake of the original exhibition, while leaving open the possibility of further meanings and interpretations yet to emerge
Reactivating a past exhibition is, in any case, a critical act. The attempt to reconstruct the original sections, installation design and objects in the same museum but in different spaces has raised a number of questions, both regarding the installation, which has required modifications, and regarding the works on display, as only some of those from 1985 could be recovered. While every effort has been made to reproduce the original display structures as faithfully as possible, missing objects (toiles and fur pieces) have been replaced with heritage reproductions
A further contemporary gesture is the inclusion of press coverage documenting the debate sparked by the exhibition at the time over the legitimacy of bringing fashion into an art museum. The selection includes articles by prominent art historians and critics, among them Giulio Carlo Argan, Maurizio Calvesi, Achille Bonito Oliva, and Vittorio Sgarbi. Together, these materials offer an opportunity to reflect, once again, on the unresolved questions surrounding fashion museology in Italy
(2026)
