Maria Grazia Chiuri's Second Fendi Ready-to-Wear Show Turns Lingerie Into the Whole Outfit

Maria Grazia Chiuri showed her second Fendi ready-to-wear collection in Milan on Wednesday, September 23 — her third Fendi show of the year counting a couture collection she also presented in Rome, and seven months after her February ready-to-wear debut at the house. Where that first Milan outing introduced her to Fendi's codes, this one pushed further into a single idea: underwear as the outfit itself, not something layered underneath one.

Bras, bloomers and slips ran through the collection as the visible garment rather than a hidden layer beneath it — The Impression's review described the bra as styled to read as a device for freedom rather than judgment or control, not as a support piece. Velvet robe-style dresses, embellished sets, and lace and embroidery in shifting lengths and weights carried the same idea through the rest of the show, down to turquoise bloomers styled like vintage lingerie.

Fendi

The reference point was Raffaella Carrà, the Italian television star, and specifically an episode of her 1970s variety show built around Adriano Celentano's "Prisencolinensinainciusol" — a song of invented, meaningless syllables built to sound like English without saying anything, per The Impression. Chiuri told Haute Living the clothes were meant to work the same way, as a second skin porous to emotion. The staging matched it: models walked inside a mirrored box, their reflections multiplying across its surfaces along with the audience's, per both AnOther and The Impression.

Fendi's history is built on fur, and Chiuri leaned on the house's own technique for it without using much of the material itself. She told AnOther that craft, more than any one silhouette, is close to Fendi's identity, and that the collection stayed light because that's how she sees the house. She applied intarsia — the patchwork piecing method Fendi has long used on fur — to fabric instead, with Roman-inspired draped dresses running alongside a handful of pieces in recycled or reconstituted fur, rather than the material driving the whole show the way it sometimes has at Fendi.

Fendi

Chiuri's February debut at Fendi was part of the same reshuffle that moved Demna to Gucci and Meryll Rogge to Marni — a wave of new creative directors landing at once. Three collections and seven months into the job, the pattern at Fendi looks less like a stylistic reset and more like Chiuri working through the house's own toolkit — its fur techniques, its Roman references — on a body-focused, lingerie-forward register that reads closer to her own signature than to what Fendi showed before her.