Fendi presented its spring/summer 2027 collection in Milan on Wednesday, September 23, the second show for Maria Grazia Chiuri since she returned to the house as creative director. Chiuri, who spent nearly a decade at Dior before the move, built the lineup around underwear brought to the surface, with lace, slips and corsetry treated as outerwear rather than as something hidden beneath it.
Silk sat against animal print and velvet against parchment, and many of the same pieces appeared on men and women without a strict divide. The runway was lined with mirrors, a nod to the artist Luciano Fabro, while the Italian entertainer Raffaella Carra served as a cultural touchstone for a collection built around pleasure, freedom and the body on display. The layering built up without a clear hierarchy between what is usually seen and what is usually kept out of view.
Chiuri tied the clothes to the house’s craft rather than to any fixed silhouette. “In Fendi, the idea of craft is very close to the identity of the brand,” she said. “Much more than a silhouette.” The emphasis on making, she suggested, mattered more than the outline of any one garment, and gave her a way to root a personal theme in the label’s own traditions.
The collection offered a clearer read on Chiuri’s direction after a debut that leaned heavily on the Fendi archive. She shares the house with Silvia Venturini Fendi, who remains a central figure in its accessories and its identity, and her arrival added a high profile name to a brand better known in recent years for its bags and its fur than for a signature ready to wear voice. Her return was read as an attempt to change that balance.
The show landed in a season of upheaval across luxury, with new creative directors settling in at houses in Milan and Paris. Chiuri’s Fendi became a case study in how a designer with a strong personal signature adapts it to a brand carrying its own long history. The balance she is trying to strike, between authorship and inheritance, is one many of her peers are now working through at the same time.
