MILAN (Reuters) - When the snow falls and the wind blows, Milanese matrons have fat furs to keep them warm. But Thursday, Fendi proved skins aren't just for ladies who lunch and showed floating coats for the young and trendy.

The Roman furrier conjured up a lazy elegance with chocolate-colored narrow skirts hanging low off the hips, pink silk shirts unbuttoned below the bust and fur jackets, vests and coats worn with a nonchalance that belied their cost.

"Luxury is about being able to afford something a bit more expensive without showing off that it's more expensive," designer Karl Lagerfeld told Reuters after the show.

Fendi's craftsmen, scurrying around backstage in white coats like a team of doctors, are famed for their way with skins. Lagerfeld tapped the best of their ability for coats that won the admiration of people who swore they'd never wear animal pelts.

"It's so light, so soft. I want to wrap myself up in it and never take it off. It's like a second skin," said one model who said she could never eat an animal, let alone wear one.

Jackets and coats were made of crocheted wool with strips of fur woven through the holes, a technique that gives the lightest look and feel as well as the warmth to ward off winter winds from Milan to Moscow.

"You'd have to be professional to know what fur it is and how it's made, what it's worth. But the important thing is that in the street you don't look like a bourgeois lady with 3,000 mink skins on her," Lagerfeld said.

That's not to say that Fendi isn't the place to go for thick traditional furs. One sable coat with a slight plum tinge was about four inches thick and valued at roughly $150,000.

A floor-length fur backed with waterproof material was shown twice -- once as a coat and then as a luxuriously warm mackintosh. For a different look, a woven fur vest was slipped over a pale slim-line satin skirt for a warm but sexy evening.

But fur is out of most people's price range and Fendi, like other luxury labels, makes more daily sales from its handbags.

For next winter, bags come in decorated half-ovals with a small hand-clutch, the shoulder strap hanging unused below. Otherwise there were rectangular satin bags with a shiny metal handle or jeweled evening bags so tiny they fit in the palm of a hand.

"It was so beautiful, so photogenic. Everyone loved it," British style icon Isabella Blow said after the show.

Fendi's new Chief Executive Michael Burke, brought in by owners LVMH last year to pull the company back to profit, said he had left Lagerfeld free to play as he wanted.