MILAN, ITALY — At every Fendi show, there are two types of attendees: those in the designer’s inner circle who get it, and those who aren’t, searching for a way to disguise their puzzlement behind fixed smiles.
If you’re a Fendi in person, chances are you see a mature woman aiming to outfit an equally grown-up customer in respectfully couture-ish clothes, and are thrilled that she can pull from a wealth of timeless nexuses to counterpoint the glut of disruption seen on the very first day of the Milan shows. If you’re an out person, you spend the show wondering what kind of woman—older or younger—would truly wear these clothes, and fretting over the proclivities she has at her disposal.
This season did epitomise a subtle stylistic shift, at any rate. Dropping the dusky, glam-rock references of her first collection at the Italian house, Maria Grazia Chiuri reversed course towards the 1970s and the decade’s cleaner, more matter-of-fact silhouettes. She showed sharply cut toppers in clashing prints, teamed with fur scarves; updated longline silhouettes and coats in dusty pastels, juxtaposed with neutrals; and dialled up sheerness across black separates.
For men, there were plunging necklines, while women’s looks leaned on retro collars and spiky heels. That polished vein of boudoir was further rendered through sexy cut-outs appearing on dresses and embellished headwear that made its own statement.
Her starting point, she explained, was a set of notions surrounding the body: a core moment of surrendering to a sense of emotional freedom that, in designing this season’s collection, became an interpretation of the desires of today’s bodies—strong and fragile at the same time, with the ability to embrace a strong relationship with one another, and where genders blur at an increasing pace.
“At the centre there’s always the body and a reflection of it,” Chiuri told reporters backstage after the show. “Certainly, the body is always the starting point, because fashion is linked to the body, and we use fashion because we want to transform our body in some way. This is what we want beyond the brand,” she reflected.
Her Spring/ Summer 2027 outing was a tribute to great personalities of 1970s Italian television, including Adriano Celentano and Raffaella Carrà, both of whom were able to measure themselves through it.
“I believe they did much more than that, actually,” she then reflected. “I believe that in some way we managed to reflect in their bodies, in some way to make ours, linking also that idea of freedom that Mrs. Fendi was influenced by in those years, because it could be a mirror theatre, where we actually reflect on the body of a generation like mine,” she said, adding, “At a time when they believed in the club as a world of freedom, a meeting point where to dance and see other bodies, and in some way to get in touch with others. It’s an important thing, especially today, that it’s lost,” Chiuri said.
“After so many years and so many useful experiments, the place where I was born gave me a clear connection with my roots, also with my cultural roots, and I think that for me it is also very pleasant to share with a generation that sometimes feels that it doesn’t have it, because we were lucky that we were brought up as young people,” she opined.
Individual dresses from this collection will undoubtedly look good on magazine pages and at the odd offbeat evening occasion, but the designer’s stylistic cohesion could do with some extra polish to acquire a fully fledged set of contemporary classics that work properly on numerous women—a hardly easy task in Milan, with its surfeit of luxury labels on display.
“For us, fashion, the body and dance were instruments of freedom,” Chiuri beamed. “And they were simply a way to express our joy, our desire to live.”
Cheers to that.
by Chidozie Obasi