Less I, More Us: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s incandescent dawn at FENDI

In a sepia-tinted Rome of memory, the five Fendi sisters stood shoulder to shoulder inside their family’s fur and leather atelier, the air rich with the scent of pelts and polished hide. They were young, audacious, and unafraid.

The business their parents, Edoardo Fendi and Adele Fendi, had founded in 1925 was respected, but the sisters wanted reverence. So they made a decision that would alter fashion history: they invited a little-known German prodigy, Karl Lagerfeld, into their Roman sanctum.

It was an act of faith. Lagerfeld answered with alchemy. He carved the now-iconic double-F — Fun Fur — into the lexicon of luxury and transformed Fendi from a family-run furrier into a global fashion force. His early ready-to-wear collections — sharp, witty, radical — were met with rapture. Critics swooned.

Buyers clamoured. Almost overnight, Fendi ascended into the international stratosphere, proving that heritage could be both honoured and electrified.

Fast forward to Milan, February chill cutting through the cobblestones. Inside Fendi’s hallowed atelier, another chapter begins. Maria Grazia Chiuri — the woman who infused Dior with a rallying cry of feminist intelligence — steps into the Roman maison’s narrative at Milan Fashion Week.

Like Silvia Venturini Fendi, the maison’s revered custodian of traditions and design, Chiuri inherits — and extends — FENDI’s rare matriarchal lineage. But she does not arrive empty-handed. Her debut for Autumn/Winter 2026 is titled Less I, More Us, and it is less slogan than manifesto.

If Lagerfeld once gave FENDI velocity, Chiuri gives it gravity. Backstage, she speaks of “collective strength” and “designing for connection rather than ego”. The collection breathes that philosophy. Tailoring is fluid yet exacting — coats cocoon the body like protective armour, cut from buttery leathers that nod to the maison’s Roman mastery.

Shearling, a quiet echo of FENDI’s fur heritage, is rendered featherlight, almost spiritual. Knit dresses skim rather than sculpt, moving as a unified rhythm when the models walk in formation — never isolated, always in dialogue.

The accessories are already whispered about in buying offices. Collaborations with Mirella Bentivoglio and SACC Napoli inject artisanal rigour into structured bags and tactile handcraft, each piece engineered to be held, passed, shared. It is luxury as communion.

The iconic Baguette is subtly reworked — elongated, softened — as if even the house’s most recognisable codes are invited into Chiuri’s conversation about togetherness.

To understand why this matters, one must look back across FENDI’s century. Few houses have balanced continuity and cool with such precision. From Roman saddle-stitching to the irreverent glamour of the ’90s, FENDI has never abandoned its leather-and-fur soul, even as it flirted with pop culture and streetwise edge. That elasticity is its genius.

Chiuri, once co-architect of modern romance at Valentino and later the steady reformist at Dior, has long understood the power of narrative. At Valentino, she mastered ethereal grandeur.

At Dior, she proved that clothes could carry ideas without losing desire. At FENDI, she appears to fuse both instincts — poetry and pragmatism — while anchoring them in craft.

Luxury today walks a tightrope. Heritage clients demand permanence; Gen Z demands purpose. Brands that tilt too far in either direction risk irrelevance. Less I, More Us feels like a calibrated answer.

 It does not scream youth, nor does it retreat into nostalgia. Instead, it proposes fashion as a shared language — intelligent, intimate, enduring.

Chiuri’s continued embrace of artistic collaboration hints at a broader shift: fashion not as solitary genius, but as cultural exchange. In a fragmented world, that is quietly radical.

Her first collection for FENDI matters because it reframes power. Not as dominance, but as unity. Not as spectacle alone, but as substance. For loyal clients and watchful newcomers alike, this is more than a seasonal drop.

It is a turning of the page in a 100-year epic — a promise that the next century of Fendi will be written not in isolation, but together.

And come next season, to carry one of Chiuri’s FENDI creations will not merely signal taste. It will signal belonging.

Maria Grazia Chiuri’s FW26 collection for FENDI will be available in all FENDI boutiques globally as well as in its online store as early as the third quarter of 2026.

*Photos courtesy of FENDI.