The Many Bodies Of FENDI: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Sensuous New Language Of Freedom for Spring/Summer 2027.

Inside the hallowed FENDI design studio, Maria Grazia Chiuri was deep in thought. Across the worktables lay bales of fabric, supple leathers, delicate lace and surfaces waiting to be transformed. Yet she was not seeing materials merely as materials. 

Her eye was travelling elsewhere — towards the human body. How would each piece fall? Where would it release rather than restrain? How would it move when the wearer moved? And, perhaps most importantly, could cloth enter into a conversation with the curves, tensions and vulnerabilities of real human anatomy?

For Chiuri, the answer begins with surrender.

For Spring/Summer 2027, her second ready-to-wear collection for FENDI, the body is no longer simply the form that clothes. It becomes the protagonist, the interlocutor and, intriguingly, the author. FENDI itself describes the collection as an exploration of contemporary bodies — simultaneously strong and fragile — in which masculine and feminine meet beyond wardrobe stereotypes, with clothing functioning as a porous second skin. 

It is a deliciously intimate proposition.

The invitation to the show borrowed from E. E. Cummings’ I like my body when it is with your body, transforming a love poem into a meditation on fashion, intimacy and mutual recognition. What happens when clothes stop dictating the body and instead listen to it? What happens when sensuality is not imposed but discovered through movement?

Chiuri answers with lingerie.

Undergarments become the collection’s quietly radical point of departure: delicate, exposed, concealed, layered and reinterpreted as an intermediate membrane between flesh and the world. Lace, embroidery, transparency and colour turn what was traditionally private into something liberated. 

The result is sensual without becoming prescriptive. Sheer fabrics reveal rather than demand attention. Soft slips and elongated dresses follow the body’s natural trajectory, while tailoring, denim and more structured pieces provide a counterpoint. 

Gloss meets matte; silk encounters animal print; velvet converses with parchment-like surfaces. Heavy and light, polished and raw, bourgeois and punk — everything is permitted to coexist.

There are no rigid hierarchies here. That may be Chiuri’s most compelling gesture.

Men and women borrow from one another. Masculine codes soften; feminine codes acquire authority. Dressing gowns leave the bedroom for the street.

Lingerie becomes outerwear. Proportion shifts between close-fitting and generously relaxed. The body is neither hidden beneath architecture nor imprisoned inside it. Instead, the garment drapes, follows and occasionally reveals.

This is where the old maxim — the body should wear the clothes, not the clothes wear the body — acquires renewed relevance. Chiuri does not reject construction; she makes construction serve movement. 

Her sophistication lies in understanding that sensuality is often less about exposure than about space: the small interval between fabric and skin, the flutter of a hem, the looseness of a sleeve, the moment when a garment moves a fraction of a second after the body has moved.

That is couture thinking translated into modern life.

The collection’s emotional vocabulary is intensified by Raffaella Carrà, whose extraordinary relationship with performance, femininity and self-invention provides one of its most vivid cultural references. Carrà becomes less a nostalgic muse than an emblem of bodily independence — a woman who understood the theatre of clothing while refusing to let clothing dictate the terms of her existence. 

The show also recalls the exuberant visual world of Carrà and Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol, while its mirrored environment draws from Luciano Fabro’s Cubo di specchi. 

The runway consequently became a philosophical device. Reflections multiplied bodies, garments and spectators, turning observation back upon itself. The audience was not simply watching fashion; it was implicated in it. In the mirror, the solitary self encountered other bodies, and the distinction between observer and observed became deliciously unstable.

Even the accessories participate in this liberation.

A sequinned, fringed or intricately embellished Baguette carries FENDI’s Roman glamour into this more liberated vocabulary, while jewel-like shoes lend an almost mischievous brilliance to the feet. 

The Maison’s current runway offering includes the Baguette 26424 and Fendi Vertigo, both already presented for preorder on FENDI’s official site. For the devoted FENDI collector, however, the real wardrobe proposition is broader: an intimate lace layer, an elongated fluid dress, a relaxed tailored piece, denim, a provocative sheer element, statement footwear and an unmistakably FENDI handbag — pieces designed to circulate through an actual wardrobe rather than exist merely as runway fantasy.

And this brings us neatly to the significance of Chiuri at FENDI.

Her career has repeatedly interrogated the relationship between femininity, identity and clothing. At FENDI, however, that conversation acquires a distinctly Roman materiality. 

This is a house whose story began in 1925, when Adele Casagrande and Edoardo Fendi established their fur and leather workshop in Rome. Their five daughters subsequently carried the business forward, before the arrival of Karl Lagerfeld in 1965 transformed the Maison’s creative trajectory. 

Lagerfeld introduced the now-iconic FF and his “Fun Fur” philosophy, helping liberate fur from traditional heaviness through colour, experimentation and extraordinary craftsmanship. 

One hundred years later, that instinct remains remarkably intact: tradition is not treated as an obligation but as material for reinvention.

This is perhaps the most seductive thing about FENDI today. The Double F is not merely a logo to be recognised across a handbag. Behind it sits a century of leatherworking, fur craftsmanship, hand-finishing, experimentation, Italian design intelligence and a willingness to make the familiar unfamiliar again. 

FENDI’s own history places innovation and tradition in deliberate equilibrium — a philosophy that remains central to the Maison. 

Chiuri understands this instinctively.

Her Spring/Summer 2027 FENDI is therefore not simply about bodies. It is about what happens when fashion respects them enough to let them breathe.

The clothes seduce, certainly. But they also listen.

And perhaps that is the most contemporary luxury of all.

FENDI Spring/Summer 2027 Ready-To-Wear and Accessories collection for Men and Women will arrive in FENDI boutiques worldwide, and its online store, as early as the end of final quarter of 2026. 

*Photos courtesy of FENDI.