Presented on February 25 at 2:00 p.m. on Via Andrea Solari 35 in Milan during Milan Fashion Week, Fendi’s Fall/Winter 2026-27 show marked a defining new chapter for the Roman house. With her debut collection for Fendi, Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri introduced a guiding principle: “Less I, more us.” The phrase—at once manifesto and methodology—frames the collection as a meditation on collaboration, shared authorship, and the deeply relational nature of fashion. Maria Grazia Chiuri at Fendi looks to the legacy of the five Fendi sisters and to the broader Italian tradition of collective craftsmanship, repositioning the wardrobe as a living space of exchange rather than individual performance.
Men and women walked the runway together, dissolving rigid binaries and reframing masculine and feminine not as opposites, but as adjectives—shared qualities within a fluid system of dress. The result was tactile, intimate, and grounded in the body: clothing not as discipline, but as accompaniment to desire.
Maria Grazia Chiuri at Fendi: Less I, More Us
Fendi Fall 2026.
Fendi Fall 2026.
Central to the collection is a collaboration with the Archivio Mirella Bentivoglio, bringing the late Italian artist’s radical investigations of language into dialogue with Fendi’s design vocabulary. Bentivoglio—known for her work in visual and concrete poetry—treated words as material objects, destabilizing meaning through fragmentation and semantic play. For FW26-27, that philosophy becomes wearable.
A limited-edition jewelry capsule revives Bentivoglio’s early 1970s designs: earrings shaped like small ears suspended from larger ears; a sculptural hand ring topped with a pearl; and the conceptual “Causa ed effetto: matrimonio manicomio” ring, whose sliding gold bar reveals and conceals the Italian words for “marriage” and “madhouse.” Jewelry here is not ornament, but sign—language turned object, thought made tactile.
Fendi Fall 2026.
Fendi Fall 2026.
The collaboration extends to ready-to-wear. Graphic knits, T-shirts, and silk pieces incorporate double-meaning phrases such as “Olt3” (a play on “oltre”), “NOIa” (we/boredom), and “Senza senso.” A revived 1971 Fou/lard scarf—splitting “foulard” into “fou” (mad) and “lard”—transforms a quotidian accessory into what Bentivoglio once described as “poem-object.”
These textual interventions from Maria Grazia Chiuri at Fendi are not surface embellishments. They reinforce Chiuri’s insistence that clothing can carry intellectual weight—becoming archive, message, and memory simultaneously.
Sisterhood, Sport, and Self-Governance
Fendi Fall 2026.
Fendi Fall 2026.
The spirit of collectivity from Maria Grazia Chiuri at Fendi continues through a collaboration with Italian multidisciplinary artist SAGG Napoli, whose declarative statements appear on football scarves and T-shirts.
“Rooted but not stuck.”
“Loyal but not obedient.”
“Volcanic but not destructive.”
Fendi Fall 2026.
Fendi Fall 2026.
Each phrase pairs affirmation with limit, proposing identity as balance rather than absoluteness. SAGG Napoli’s background in competitive sport informs this language: autonomy and teamwork held in tension. In the context of Fendi’s house codes, these slogans articulate a contemporary sisterhood—self-governed, discerning, and emotionally regulated.
The garments themselves echo this ethos of recalibration and renewal. A significant technical focus of the collection lies in sartorial regeneration—particularly the remodeling of fur pieces. Rather than producing anew, artisans unpick and reconstruct archival garments, reshaping silhouette and proportion for the present moment. In an era of accelerated consumption, this practice foregrounds what theorist Jonathan Chapman calls “emotionally durable design”: clothing that sustains meaning over time.
Outerwear is especially resonant. Recut furs appear lighter, elongated, and architectural, paired with streamlined tailoring that balances softness and precision. Structured coats carry subtle textual details; tactile knits hug the body without constraining it. The dialogue between masculine and feminine codes—broad-shouldered outer layers over fluid underpinnings—feels less like contrast and more like conversation.
Echo of Love: Craft as Resistance
Fendi Fall 2026.
Fendi Fall 2026.
Under the thematic banner “Echo of Love”, Chiuri frames restyling not merely as sustainability gesture, but as creative resistance. To remodel a garment is to honor its memory while reshaping its future—a quiet rebellion against the logic of disposability.
In this way, Maria Grazia Chiuri at Fendi situates the house within a broader cultural conversation unfolding across Milan Fashion Week: one that asks how heritage houses can evolve responsibly without abandoning their DNA. At Via Andrea Solari, the show space underscored this balance—industrial in architecture yet intimate in staging, allowing the tactility of materials and the graphic clarity of language to come forward.
Fendi Fall 2026.
Fendi Fall 2026.
The runway became a site of encounter: between generations of women artists, between archival thought and contemporary craft, between the singular and the collective.
With “Less I, more us,” Maria Grazia Chiuri signals not just a debut, but a directional shift. At Fendi, the wardrobe is no longer a solitary statement. It is a shared archive—of language, of memory, of desire—carried forward together.
