Maria Grazia Chiuri dismantles her own first-show vocabulary and replaces it with something more personal – lingerie, Raffaella Carrà, and a mirror-lined room that asked the audience to look at themselves
Before the first look appeared, the E.E. Cummings line did the declaring: I like my body when it is with your body. Lit up at the entrance like a theater marquee – poetry as program note – it was not a subtle setup. What followed was a collection built to honor it.
Maria Grazia Chiuri’s second ready-to-wear showing for the Roman house was, at its best, a genuine loosening. The white tuxedo shirt that anchored her debut got taken apart here – one reduced to a harness top, another reworked with porthole cutouts on the sides of clinging dresses, plunging necklines applied to lace. Where the first show built its argument outward from tailoring, this one went the other direction. The lingerie came forward.
The cultural engine was Raffaella Carrà, the Italian pop phenomenon pinned to Chiuri’s mood board this season, whose Saturday-night variety show became the collection’s organizing spirit. Specifically: an episode in which Carrà and Adriano Celentano sang Prisencolinensinainciusol, a track built from gibberish whose point was that rhythm and body communicate what words cannot. Chiuri, who spoke over a mic before the show, drew the fur connection plainly – the founding Fendi sisters treated fur as “not only a material” but something that is also close to “the idea of lightness, sensuality,” she said. For spring, that translated into organza and gossamer, lace rompers, filmy dance silhouettes, animal prints in a low, disco key.
The staging committed fully to the thesis. Mirrored surfaces lined the runway, creating multiple reflections of each look – the audience watching the clothes watching themselves back. Chiuri explained on social media that mirrors let you discover yourself among others, and the set referenced Luciano Fabro’s Mirror Cube as formal precedent. The architecture earned its place. Whether it was the most useful format for actually seeing clothes is a different conversation, and the show’s momentum occasionally paid for it.
Where the collection held together, it held tightly. The bra worn as a top was a position, not a styling accident – as it was the day before at Prada, where the same instinct surfaced. At Fendi, the lingerie logic felt more grounded in the house’s particular history: this is a brand the founding sisters built, and Chiuri has been circling what that means since she arrived. The intimates read accordingly – lace with real weight to it, turquoise bloomers that recalled a different era’s underwear, the kind wrapped in tissue and saved for occasions, velvet robe silhouettes, embellished sets. Fringed bags, head scarves and dangling fur tippets held the ’70s reference without hammering it.
The wobble came in the accumulation of themes that didn’t quite converge. The lingerie argument is coherent. The folkloric vests, the head scarves, the passages of what read as militaria – these opened threads the show didn’t run out. Chiuri said before the presentation that she understood “mode apparently is only about brand” and that she was working against that. The impulse shows. But a collection with one clear thing to say tends to press harder than one trying to say three or four things simultaneously.
Still: this was a lighter, more assured collection than her first. The instinct to pull apart the house’s existing language rather than simply continue it is the right one, and the body as muse – not the body as provocation but as genuine organizing principle – is a subject Chiuri has the material vocabulary and the house heritage to pursue. Whether she gets there in one direction next time, rather than several, is the question the spring collection raises without quite answering.
See the complete collection below:
Images courtesy of Fendi
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