Fendi furore at Paris Fashion Week

Karl Lagerfeld, above, will celebrate 50 years of working for Fendi with a fashion line featuring couture fur. Valery Hache / AFP

Italy’s Fendi – which opened a boutique in Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates last week – is set to raise hackles with an all-fur collection at Paris Fashion Week on Wednesday.

High-fashion designers will unveil their autumn/ winter collections over five days in the French capital. The shows were kicked off by Russian couturier Ulyana Sergeenko and Dutch designer Ilja Visser.

But the highlight of the extravaganza, which began on Sunday, will be German fashion luminary Karl Lagerfeld’s collection, celebrating his 50 years working for Fendi, which has been hailed the “longest relationship between a designer and a fashion house”.

The Fendi show will feature “haute fourrure” or, couture fur – a material the luxury fashion brand has never shied away from.

French film star and passionate animal activist Brigitte Bardot has already shown her disapproval by writing a letter to Choupette Lagerfeld, the designer’s pampered feline companion.

Bardot appealed to the cat – which has about 48,000 Twitter followers – to “purr in the ear” of her master and save her “furry friends”.

But even Choupette, whose every whim is catered for, is unlikely to stop the show.

Lagerfeld has often said that while he is very sympathetic to the anti-fur cause, doing away with it entirely would cause a lot of people to lose their jobs.

"For me, as long as people eat meat and wear leather, I don't get the message," he told The New York Times in a recent interview, before adding that he preferred not to think about how the animals died.

The indefatigable Lagerfeld, 81, will also be presenting his collection for Chanel, the fashion house that is perhaps the most synonymous with Paris’s reputation for glamour, and known for spectacular staging.

In total, about 30 designers will present the Haute Couture shows seen only in the City of Light.

The Haute Couture designation is protected by French law and assigned exclusively by the ministry of industry to 14 houses whose high-end clothes are entirely made by hand and tailored to each client.

Today, the glitterati were glued to the show by Schiaparelli, as French designer Bertrand Guyon made his debut as style director for the house.

Founded in 1930 by Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel’s biggest rival, the house made its couture comeback in January last year after lying dormant for 60 years.

On Wednesday, John Galliano will put on his second couture show for Maison Margiela in Paris, after choosing to present his comeback collection in London in January – seen as a snub to the French capital, where he fell from grace.

Galliano lost his job as Dior’s star designer in 2011 after he was filmed in a Paris bar making slurred insults against Jews and disappeared from the catwalk for several years.

This time, it is Valentino who will be missing from the Paris couture diary, having chosen to show his collection on Thursday in Rome, as he celebrates the opening of his largest store in the world.