Maria Grazia Chiuri Bets On Pragmatism to Reignite Fendi

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MILAN — “I’m not an entertainment designer,” Maria Grazia Chiuri said, speaking from Fendi’s showroom the night before her debut show as the Roman house’s chief creative officer.

It was an apt introduction to a collection that stood out for its restrained palette and surprisingly sober take on a house that has long been known for its playful, colourful angle on Italian glamour.

“In my view it’s not important to create something for a one shot, to surprise someone. Otherwise I would do a performance at the little theatre where I do costumes. Why not, it’s fun — but this is another job,” she said.

Her debut Fendi collection, which she staged Wednesday in the brand’s Via Solari show space in Milan, was dominated by black, punctuated by touches of white and beige, a single red dress. Because “the colour people really use is black. Blue, ivory, some touch of red. That’s it,” she said. “The other things, I’m not sure it’s true. Maybe grey, a touch of green. We have to be pragmatic. It’s time — it’s really time if we want to move to the future of this industry.”

Chiuri is known as a designer with convictions, deeply felt and often bluntly expressed. She is at her most convincing when she can dive headlong into a specific reference or craft technique — such as the life and embroidery practice of Mary, Queen of Scots, Indian mirror work, fuselli lace from Puglia — obsessions that allow her to put principles like empowered femininity and celebrating fashion’s global atelier into action. Articulating a vision for Fendi and its 100-year archive in the space of a single seven-minute runway show, by contrast, is a lot to bite off for any designer — even one with the mastery and momentum built up over ten years leading the sprawling womenswear machine at LVMH stablemate Dior.

While it’s unclear how much practically banishing colour from the runway will advance the fashion agenda, what the restrained palette did achieve was to spotlight silhouette, which has rarely been the focus at a house best known for its lush textures, patchwork Baguettes and monogrammed merch.

Silhouette is the “aspect that is not clear at Fendi,” Chiuri said. She is focusing on blazers — styled atop chemisier dresses, knee-length skirts and relaxed trousers — as foundational elements in a Fendi wardrobe that can be shared across men and women, allowing the brand to adopt a more unified message.

If Fendi may have lacked an ultra-clear, recognisable silhouette, Chiuri does not: In Wednesday’s show there were button shirts tucked into lace skirts, plunging necklines broken up by chokers or little collars, slingbacks and pumps styled with calf socks. All of which will be familiar to those who followed the designer’s tenure at Dior and before that as co-creative director of Valentino.

The designer’s arrival is hoped to end a period of transitions that has dimmed Fendi’s performance in recent years. Following Karl Lagerfeld’s death in 2019, the brand’s longtime menswear and accessories chief — third-generation family member Silvia Venturini Fendi — stepped in to design the womenswear for a few seasons. This was followed by a three year stint under Kim Jones, who was splitting his time with Dior Homme. After which Venturini Fendi stepped in again to assure the transition prior to Chiuri’s nomination last year.

A new CEO, Ramon Ros — formerly president of Mainland China at Louis Vuitton — has been brought in to lead the business, becoming the brand’s fourth CEO in 10 years. While LVMH doesn’t break out sales for individual brands, Citi estimates Fendi’s 2025 revenue at €1.8 billion ($2 billion), down more than 20 percent from peak sales estimated at €2.3 billion in 2023, when the brand was riding high on luxury’s post-pandemic surge.

Creating a more recognisable wardrobe could be a first step to reigniting the business. The risk is that this wardrobe could feel too similar to her recent work for Dior: The idea that customers will follow a designer’s aesthetic from house to house has certainly been challenged in recent years at Fendi’s Roman neighbour Valentino, where clients have been slow to warm to a sharp pivot to designer Alessandro Michele’s vision.

If the collection features clear echoes of Chiuri’s work for Dior, her take on the brand image so far does not. A new logo commissioned from graphic designer Leonardo Sonnoli is crisp, angular, neutral, whereas the logo for her Dior era had been soft, grand, Romantic. A first accessories and shoe campaign by Jo Ann Callis hinted at a subversive, kinky-dark take on domesticity as male hands were seen gripping a woman’s ankles.

Clear Fendi-isms in the collection included the embrace of intarsia — most memorable on a camouflage shearling coat and fuzzy multi-coloured monster bag, early examples of a new upcycling program in which the brand’s haute fourrure ateliers will rework existing furs into one-off couture creations. Trench coats and trench dresses (harking back to costumes Fendi supplied for filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni) and saddle stitching (the signature of the brand’s selleria line) are other codes Chiuri said she plans to explore, as well as the story of the five Fendi sisters, a “model of creative and pragmatic empowerment,” according to the designer.

“I think sometimes if you change all the time, you lose your DNA. I want to bring all the elements of the house and to put them in order in a way that is very visible and clear for the audience,” Chiuri said.

If clarity was certainly not lacking in the designer’s debut, drama and surprise were hardly the order of the day.

“I don’t think it’s true that if you are creative, you are not pragmatic. That if you are creative, you have to be romantic. It’s not my point of view. We have a big responsibility, because behind us there are a lot of people,” she said — reminding me of the thousands of people working in the company, not to mention its vast web of suppliers.

“Less I, more us,” was the motto for the collection, emblazoned in graphic letters on the runway.

“I work very seriously and only for a project that I believe in long-term,” she said.

All the Looks From Fendi Autumn/Winter 2026

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