Less I, more us — Chiuri returns to Fendi

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Maria Grazia Chiuri walked into the Fendi headquarters on Via Solari in Milan, thirty years after she first walked out. Her debut collection for the house, shown during AW26, was a quiet manifesto for collective creativity, Art Deco geometry, and the kind of elegance that does not need to announce itself.

There is something appealing about a homecoming that refuses sentimentality. Chiuri began her career at Fendi at twenty-four, working alongside the five founding sisters and Silvia Venturini Fendi. Together, they created the Baguette bag in 1997, one of the most commercially and culturally significant accessories of the past three decades. When she left, first for Valentino and then for Dior, the assumption was that chapter had closed. Fashion loves a clean narrative. But Fendi, a house built by sisters and sustained by inheritance, has never operated on linear time.

Her return as chief creative officer, announced in October 2025 after her departure from Dior, carried significant expectation. The house had been without a singular creative vision since the death of Karl Lagerfeld in 2019, with Kim Jones handling womenswear and Silvia Venturini Fendi continuing menswear and accessories. The question was straightforward: could Chiuri, who had spent nearly a decade building her own identity at Dior, sublimate that voice into the codes of a house she once helped define?

The motto and the method

Chiuri answered with a phrase that became the collection's organizing principle: "Less I, more us." In an era where creative directors function as celebrity auteurs, complete with personal mythologies and Instagram followings measured in millions, the statement was pointed. She was not interested in performing genius. She was interested in building something with the people already in the room.

The collection opened with a black silk shirt dress and blazer, monochromatic and deliberate. The palette stayed controlled through the first dozen looks, establishing a seriousness of intent before the embellishments arrived. This was not a designer trying to dazzle. This was someone laying foundations.

What followed drew explicitly from the house's origins. Fendi was founded in 1925, and Chiuri leaned into the geometric vocabulary of that period. Art Deco lines appeared in the detailing of lace flapper dresses, in the angular construction of tailored coats, and in the perforated leather treatments that updated the house's signature material. The references were there for anyone who wanted to find them, but the clothes never felt like costume. They felt current, grounded in a real woman's morning rather than a mood board's afternoon.

A wardrobe without walls

The collection's most talked-about move was also its simplest. Chiuri showed masculine and feminine versions of the same garments, side by side, with identical cuts differentiated only by sizing. A tailored blazer appeared first on a woman, then on a man, in the same silk and with the same buttons. Trousers, flight suits, embroidered gilets all followed the same logic. "We change the size, but it's the same," she explained. The shared wardrobe concept sounded like a talking point, but on the runway it read as something more genuine: a refusal to treat gender as a boundary that requires different pattern-cutting.

This was not androgyny for the sake of a headline. The tailoring was precise, the proportions carefully considered for different bodies. A hand-crafted leather lace coat that draped beautifully on a taller frame appeared again, recalibrated, on a shorter one. The attention was in the fit, not the theory. Chiuri has always been more interested in how clothes work than how they photograph, and that sensibility was everywhere here.

Art Deco and the Baguette

Accessories carried the collection's commercial weight. The Baguette returned in heavily embellished versions, each one a deliberate callback to the bag Chiuri helped create three decades ago. But the real surprise was the refreshed Fendi logo and Double-F monogram, treated as a signature rather than a splashed all-over print. Perforated shoppers bore the new font with a lightness that suggested Chiuri understood the difference between branding and taste.

Elsewhere, detached white cotton collars appeared on several looks, a quiet tribute to Karl Lagerfeld's personal uniform. The gesture was knowing without being heavy-handed. A nod, not a eulogy.

The collaboration with the estate of Italian sculptor and poet Mirella Bentivoglio produced jewellery and graphic T-shirts that introduced a different register into the collection. Bentivoglio's work, which explored language and feminine identity through concrete poetry, gave Chiuri a reference that was intellectual without being inaccessible. Artist Sagg Napoli contributed furry football scarves bearing the phrase "Rooted but not stuck," which may have been the most honest summary of what the entire show was trying to say.

The echo of the house

One initiative announced alongside the collection deserves particular attention. The "Echo of Love" project will allow Fendi clients to bring vintage furs to the atelier for artisanal reworking by the house's craftspeople. In practical terms, it is a sustainability gesture. In symbolic terms, it is something more interesting: an acknowledgement that the most valuable thing a luxury house possesses is not its current season but its accumulated history. A fur coat bought in 1985 can be remade, re-cut, brought forward. The material carries the memory. Chiuri is asking clients to participate in that continuity.

The venue itself reinforced the message. The show took place in Fendi's recently renovated headquarters on Via Solari, a building that wears its own history without needing to explain it. The setting felt intentional. No borrowed palaces, no rented art spaces. Just the house, showing in its own home, which is a kind of confidence that most brands cannot summon.

The verdict

Chiuri's debut at Fendi was not revolutionary. She would probably be the first to say so. What it was, instead, was something rarer: a collection that trusted its own intelligence, that valued craft over spectacle, and that understood the difference between starting over and picking up where you left off. The black silk opening look was a statement of discipline. The shared wardrobe was a statement of philosophy. The Baguette, embellished and heavy with meaning, was a statement of coming home.

Milan has spent the past several seasons absorbing change. Demna at Gucci, new voices at Marni and elsewhere. Chiuri's Fendi does not compete with those disruptions. It sits alongside them, offering something older and more patient. A house run by women, now led again by a woman who helped build it. Less I, more us. For once, the motto and the collection said the same thing.

Fendi AW26 was presented during Milan Fashion Week, February 2026, at the house’s headquarters on Via Solari, Milan.

Photography courtesy of Fendi / 10 Magazine