Haute couture is meant to move, evolve, and surprise, yet somehow, Fendi’s Maria Grazia Chiuri has found an expensive way to stand absolutely still

What is the real value of placing fashion adjacent to art? Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut Fendi couture collection tried to answer that by presenting the outfits at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM) in Rome. This was not Ms Chiuri’s first showing inside a museo, having exhibited three years ago in the Brooklyn Museum for the Dior Pre-Fall 2024. The choice of venue was deeply intentional. It served as a direct dialogue with Fendi’s own history. This was, we quickly saw, to bookend and reproduce a historic 1985 Fendi exhibition, Un Percorso di Lavoro (A Work Path), conceived by Karl Lagerfeld at the exact same museum, even if back then, putting clothes in the GNAM was so scandalous that it sparked Italian parliamentary debates. But this time, it is not clear what her point was. A collection that looked like high-end retail, presented as haute couture inside a state museum felt like a commercial trick. For a long time, Ms Chiuri leaned towards the serviceable, even pedestrian, staging them inside the confines of borrowed gravitas: feminist slogans, collaborations with artists, museum-like scenography. The garments themselves rarely carried the weight, but the mise-en-scène insisted they were important. That has been so allergic to the truth, it could be anaphylactic shock.

Fendi once defined itself by technical audacity in fur. Now, under Ms Chiuri, it is self-determined by staging couture as a museum‑validated ritual rather than a display of bold design. Under Mr Lagerfeld, fur was made fluid, light, and experimental. He turned what was once unthinkable into the acceptable: shaving, embossing, and treating fur to mimic other textures (velvet, tweed, even denim), destabilizing its identity as “just fur”. He turned a symbol of bourgeois conservatism into a medium of couture innovation. But Fendi today barely works with fur, and without it, the house has lost its experimental core. As fur is now culturally radioactive, the house had to come up with something else. So Ms Chiuri tried echoing Mr Laferfeld’s 1985 exhibition, but it was not, to be certain, a reflection. Ms Chiuri kept tenaciously to what she did best: friendly, feminine, and without fear of showing skin. Her outfits were certainly immaculate, though they possessed all the narrative complexity of a mid-July amble through the Roman Forum—perfectly preserved, predictably dusty, and entirely without shade. In a museum filled with works by Modigliani, Twombly, or Pascali, it was a desperate performance of belonging.

Throughout her career after decamping Valentino for Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri has offered mostly variations of three silhouettes, calibrated for women who want to wear their femininity and their feminism, concurrently. It has not looked like she wanted Fendi to have a shot at something audacious. Her fans and the polite members of the media insisted that her clothes are “well-crafted”. That is not in dispute, but the clothes felt finished in a way that suggested that they were never in the process of becoming anything new. Consider the openwork fabrics that showed considerable skin, the bib-front dinner shirts, the body-flattering slender dresses, the tunic-vests paired with slacks—they have been her staples, those reliable old warhorses we’ve seen trotted out season after endless season. At what point does a design signature cease to be a hallmark and start looking like a sad inability to let go? We struggle to find a reason why we are still expected to greet the repetition with anything other than polite indifference, even when the industry wants very much to he impressed. It is puzzling that the immense resources of the Fendi atelier were used to achieve a state of this visual uniformity, rather than a less listless design position. Fendi’s lack of stakes today is staggering.

Beyond the usual suspects, there was the chromatic monotony that felt like a paint-by-numbers kit designed by someone who dabbles only in black and white, and, now and then, the colour of ‘skin’. It is a bold choice to commit to such a largely binary palette, allowing the textures—lace on bare skin—and the occasional ruffles to serve as the sole points of sensuality. The near-nudity, the ease of negligee. and her favourite boy-shorts-as-underwear were again outsourcing sexual charge to fabric. It is not clear why Fendi needs veil and reveal and the erotic ambiguity only to arrive at a middle ground. Sexiness is one of the few levers left that can make bland clothes look hot, a convenient way to stage intensity without overworking silhouette or construction. But Madonna would look at the collection and hop over to Dolce & Gabbana. Fendi’s couture has never really felt dense with daring, but now it feels hollower: the sensuality is scripted by sheerness, not by innovation in cut or silhouette. It was a borrowed eroticism, just as her museum staging was borrowed authority. See-through was the excuse for sensuality, just as art was the pretext for importance. Clearly, Fendi had nowhere to hide its lack of design ambition. Looking like couture is not being it.

Screen shot: fendi/YouTube. Photos: Fendi