Maria Grazia Chiuri comes home to Fendi

Rome has a way of circling you back to yourself. For Maria Grazia Chiuri, that circle closes at Fendi.

Nearly four decades after first walking into the house as a 24-year-old accessories designer, Chiuri returns as chief creative officer, older, sharper, carrying the institutional memory of Valentino and the global heft of Dior.

“New beginnings are always exciting and challenging yourself is stimulating for a creative person,” she says, calm amid the Milan debut frenzy.

If her first tenure at Fendi was formative, this one is intentional. Back then, she was building bags. Now she’s rebuilding perspective. The industry has mutated; so has she. “I did not have a comprehensive vision,” she admits of her early years. Experience, she suggests, is the real luxury.

Her strategy isn’t nostalgia, it’s recalibration. She revisited the original Fendi logo with graphic designer Leonardo Sonnoli, honoring the rigor once imposed by Carla Fendi. Proportion matters. Typography matters. Discipline matters. “It’s the brand’s signature,” she insists.

Chiuri speaks of the five Fendi sisters, Adele’s daughters Anna, Carla, Paola, Franca, and Alda, like architects of a philosophy. Their collaboration, their division of roles, their foresight in appointing a then-unknown Karl Lagerfeld, these are not anecdotes, but blueprints. She feels accountable to that lineage.

Her first collection begins with clarity. Jacket, trousers, silhouette. Menswear and womenswear developed in tandem. “A jacket is a jacket,” she shrugs. Gender is secondary; construction is not.

Accessories remain the spine. Selleria, Peekaboo, Baguette, not museum relics, but living codes. She is editing, not erasing. Fur, once uncomplicated, now demands nuance. Craft must evolve without losing its nerve. Restoration, longevity, savoir-faire: these are her counterarguments in an era quick to simplify fashion into caricature, or worse, cinema fantasy.

What does she bring? Elasticity. She has worked under families, funds, conglomerates. She understands power structures as well as hemlines. And Rome? “Every day is the first day,” she says. At Fendi, it might be.