Designers Really Want Us to Wear Fur. Or Something Like It.

There was really no way around it: A show celebrating 100 years of Fendi was always going to mean celebrating fur.

Fendi, after all, began as a handbag and fur workshop. And according to Silvia Venturini Fendi, the designer behind the centenary collection and the lone remaining family member involved in the business (now owned by LVMH), when she began thinking about what that might look like, she thought of her first Fendi memory. Which happened to be of herself in 1966, age 6, walking in her first Fendi show and wearing a child-size fur equestrian jacket designed by Karl Lagerfeld. She had the photo on her mood board backstage.

So no surprise that what turned out to be a lovely Fendi show opened first with Ms. Venturini’s 6-year-old twin grandchildren wearing new versions of that jacket, and then with what appeared to be a voluptuous fox fur (or rather a fox-like shearling, since that is what most of the fur really was), belted at the waist. Or that it was followed by more furs, among the graceful beaded 1920s frocks and strong-shouldered suits that fell stylistically somewhere between the ’40s and ’80s, including intarsia furs. Not to mention the best new accessory of the week: a long fur gilet-cum-scarf that was simply the collar and front of a greatcoat, cut to be worn on its own.

But to see fur, or at least what looked like fur, on almost every other runway in Milan? That was unexpected. Especially because what was really notable about the fur-for-all was how very — well, furry all the maybe-fur looked. Almost Yeti-furry. 1980s Ivana Trump furry. Mob wife furry. I’m-all-in-on-fur furry.

Which made it also impossible to avoid the conclusion that, as far as designers were concerned, this particular material, out of favor for a long time, was once again part of the fashion arsenal.