Gilty Pleasures.(gold furs)

Byline: editor:Sally Singer

With its 24K fur, Fendi sets a new gold standard. Robert Sullivan reports.

I magine yourself Sophia Loren in 1965, pulling up to the opera, chauffeur opening the door, flashbulbs, mink stole, a fur moment. Now imagine yourself today. Fur is glamorous, but sometimes it's not enough. It needs to be supercharged. This is where gold fur comes in. For some people who are going to love gold fur, it will be the equivalent of multiplying the Sophia Loren fur moment by about a million. For other people who are going to love gold fur, it will be a wearable investment: You can sport part of your financial portfolio, and your financial adviser will be pleased to see you so prominently into gold and out of bad stocks. For Fendi, the people who pioneered gold fur, it is the end of two decades of gold fur development, the gold fur finish line. "It's genius, no?" says Karl Lagerfeld. "I think I had asked him for 20 years."

"Him" is Roberto Masci, head of the Fendi fur design studio in Rome. Masci, who grew up in an apartment above an ancient Roman furrier, got his first job with a furrier at the age of thirteen. Today he manages the little shop of craftspeople just down from the Spanish Steps, on the top floor of an old palace on Via del Leoncino. "It's divine, no?" Lagerfeld says of the studio. "It couldn't be more center of Rome." (When LVMH bought Fendi, it unified the various workshops the way Giuseppe Garibaldi unified Italy.) Masci wears a blue suit and a dark-blue tie, and you might mistake him for a particularly animated banker except that when he handles fur, his hands move like a sculptor's--pushing, pulling, testing the fur like clay. For years, when a gold fur prototype came into the shop, he would press his hand across it and say, "Male!" which means "bad" in Italian.

Meanwhile, the list of Fendi fur firsts grew--dyed fur, uncut-fur constructions, unlined fur, fur lace, Shar-Pei-like fur workmanship--and all of them came from Lagerfeld, who was hired by the five Fendi sisters in 1965. He began with a winter sports line in fur, a scandal not because of the fur, which is a scandal for many people today, but because of how fur was used: informally, rather than typically classical. "I said, 'Why don't we use fur like material?' " remembers Lagerfeld, whose double- F logo for the house originally stood for "fun fur." At the time, Lagerfeld played with the Roman fashion sensibility. "There was the chic, elegant, aristocratic life," he recalls, "and there was the more funny, tacky Italian movie world. This was those days!"

In a way, gold fur marries those two Romes. The Reese's Peanut Butter Cup moment came two summers ago, when Gianpaolo Girardello, a businessman, and Andrea Balestra, a jeweler, shared a taxi after a Depeche Mode concert. Girardello exclaimed, "Mi piaci!" meaning "I like you." A new company was born, as well as named, and the Mi Piaci team then began to experiment with putting gold on things you might not necessarily put ...