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We’re off to the races in Milan and one of the biggest debuts of the season is Maria Grazia Chiuri’s collection for Fendi. After nine years as creative director of women’s collections at Dior, Chiuri has passed the baton to Jonathan Anderson and has now returned to where it all began in 1989.
Amid the creative director reshuffle of the last three years, the number of women leading the great houses has dwindled — making Chiuri’s appointment all the more significant. She is not alone in making a landmark entrance this season: Meryll Rogge will also debut as head of Marni, adding another female voice to a conversation sorely in need of them.
For Chiuri, Fendi is less a new chapter than a homecoming. She joined the house in 1989 at just 25 years old and spent a formative decade there, contributing to one of fashion’s most enduring accessories stories: the Baguette bag, that slim, crook-of-the-arm icon that has never waned in popularity. She departed for Valentino in 1999, spending seventeen years there — many of them alongside Pierpaolo Piccioli — before her history-making move to Dior in 2016. Now, she returns with the authority of experience and what is clearly a deep personal investment. “I feel the responsibility to do a good job here so that [all the Fendis] can recognise themselves in the brand today,” she told WWD. “I want to pay tribute to them and for me this is an honour, and it has a sentimental value.”
That sentiment threaded visibly through the collection, which centred on what Chiuri described as a “shared wardrobe” — a co-ed approach to dressing built on the conviction that great pieces transcend gender. “The idea was to work on the collection with the same team for men and women because the idea is that we do a coat, we do a jacket, we do pants. We change the size, but it’s the same — a transversal wardrobe.… My idea is to make the jacket that everyone desires.”
If the collection was short on theatrical spectacle, it was long on considered, wearable desire. There was a military rigour to some of the outerwear, a gentle bohemian ease to the slip dresses, and a certain louche nonchalance in the knitted pieces and belted vests that felt simultaneously that carried a touch of nostalgia — you could imagine Sienna Miller wearing many of these pieces in the 2010s.
The front row was suitably stellar: Uma Thurman, Dakota Fanning, Shailene Woodley, Iris Law and Monica Bellucci lent the proceedings a pleasing sweep of generations, a fitting audience for a designer whose whole proposition is, after all, clothes that belong to everyone.
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