Maria Grazia Chiuri opened a new chapter for Fendi Couture on July 9, 2026, presenting her debut Women's Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2026-2027 collection at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome. The location mattered as much as the clothes. By staging her first show for the storied Roman house on home ground, Chiuri tied her arrival to Fendi's history rather than setting it apart from it, and the result read less like a debut and more like a continuation of a long conversation about craftsmanship.
That conversation started decades earlier with Karl Lagerfeld, whose influence hovered over the entire evening. Before the runway show, guests including Sarah Jessica Parker and Monica Bellucci walked through "After Steps Through Work. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985," a restaging of one of the earliest fashion exhibitions ever held inside a major art museum. Sketches, toiles, and pattern boards pinned with tiny fur fragments arranged into geometric patterns traced Lagerfeld's first twenty years at Fendi, work that eventually led the house to introduce haute couture, or haute fourrure, back in 2015.
