MILAN, Italy -- Fendi, Italy's most feminist fashion house, got into trouble Wednesday with a joke about rape.
'It is a terrible misunderstanding,' said Carla Fendi, one of five sisters who run the fashion empire started 60 years ago by their mother and now including three third-generation Fendi women.
'To think that we of all people would want to insult women,' she said.
At issue was a line in the program for the Fendi spring and summer line shown Tuesday to several thousand buyers and fashion writers from around the world at the Milano Collezioni.
'Shaped to be raped,' it said of the new sexy look in women's clothes.
Italian fashion writers ignored it and most Americans considered it an example of the fractured English that often appears in translations from the Italian.
But at least one American newspaper reported it and put the Fendis under fire.
'I don't find it at all funny and I don't think any American woman would,' said one writer who asked not to be identified.
It was designer Karl Lagerfeld, a German who lives in Paris and does collections for Chanel and in his own name as well as the Fendi line, who came up with the phrase.
Lagerfeld wears his hair in a pigtail and is known as the enfant terrible, or bad boy, of the European fashion world.
'He likes to shock a little although he didn't mean to really offend anyone,' Carla Fendi said.
The designer started with the perfectly respectable French phrase, 'formee pour etre desiree,' or shaped to be desired.
'Then he said 'shaped to be raped' and it rhymed so well in English that we all laughed,' said Fendi.
'And you see in Italian, men may say of a women, 'She is so beautiful I want to violentare (rape) her,' without any connotation of violence, only of Latin admiration. It simply means a woman is desirable,' she said.
Aniko Gall, fashion merchandising director for Garfinckel's of Washington, said she was not disturbed by the phrase because she knew and thought most people in the fashion world knew what Lagerfeld meant.
'He was just having fun and stating the fact that body consciousness is in after all the menswear styles,' Gall said. 'You have to report a designer in a fashion context. To take what he says out of context and make it a social issue changes it entirely.'
Pia Soli of the Rome newspaper Il Tempo, considered one of Italy's top fashion writers, said she sympathizes with Lagerfeld.
'He got caught in a nuance of translation,' she said. 'I think it is a mistake of our bad English. We don't understand the connotation of the words often. Languages can be so difficult.
'That's why we all have passports.'
