Today’s news of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s return to fashion has, predictably, sparked some snark. Despite—or maybe because of?—the designer’s record as a heart-on-sleeve feminist and the most commercially successful woman fashion designer of the last decade, the prospect of her return to Fendi nearly six months after departing Dior is prompting as many eye rolls online as drum rolls.
I reckon that the eye rollers will be pivoting pretty soon. This Fendi placement is far from arbitrary. Before she arrived at Dior to almost quadruple sales over six years, and before she rose to her first creative directorship position alongside Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino, Chiuri learned her trade at Fendi. There is arguably no living fashion designer without Fendi in her name as deeply connected to the Roman house as her.
Chiuri, now 61, was raised in Rome by her seamstress turned-boutique-owner mother, and her military professional father. She graduated from Rome’s Istituto Europeo di Design in the late 1980s and bagged her first job as an accessories designer at Fendi in 1989. It was there that she worked under “le sorelle” of Fendi sisters—Paola, Anna, Franca, Carla, and Alda—who were instrumental in building the house that had been founded by their parents Adele and Edoardo.
“We were a sorority,” Chiuri once recalled. She spent the second half of her 20s and the first of her 30s in that sorority, a time during which she also became a mother herself: in interviews she has recalled breast-feeding her son in the Fendi studio, while her daughter Rachele amused herself rearranging the handbags in the sample room.
Speaking in 2023 at Vogue Italia’s Forces of Fashion event, Chiuri recalled: “Fendi was a great school and I think the thing I learned most from that company was cooperation, that of speaking in the plural: no one said I, everyone spoke about us.” In another interview Chiuri described how she honed her craft during these Fendi years, saying: “I was born an accessory designer. I love accessories. I obsess over them—I really obsess. [At Fendi] we experimented in unexplored territory, making embroidered bags and shoes.”
During this time Chiuri was responsible for bringing an important new talent to Fendi. Through her friend Giambattista Valli, Chiuri had met Pierpaolo Piccioli when he was still a student. Then, when a position became free on the Fendi accessory team, she pushed for his recruitment. In 2012, she reminisced about that moment in an interview, saying: “You know, back then fashion was different, more friendly. All the designers were together, we all had the same dream to make it, but there was no competition—we helped each other, we were all in it together.” Also part of the circle was Silvia Venturini Fendi, who remains part of the house as its Honorary President.
Chiuri and Piccioli formed an effective creative partnership, during which they developed the house’s best known accessory: the Baguette. It was the success of the Baguette that, at least in part, prompted interest from outside companies in purchasing Fendi. When the Fendi sisters did decide to accept an offer, selling a majority to LVMH and Prada in 1999, Chiuri and Piccioli made the joint decision to leave. “We loved Fendi,” she told Elle Collections in 2011: “It was our family.” Chiuri and Piccioli said that when they left Fendi they were determined to work under a great couturier in order to refine their own craft, a strategy that led them in 1999 to Valentino.
Chiuri’s success since, much of it under LVMH, has been such that her feminocentric design codes have become broadly familiar to many. Ironically, that familiarity has led some to underestimate her creativity. So although her stint at Dior means she is a designer with nothing left to prove, the prospect of her reestablishing herself with her Fendi “family” is a tantalizing one. She returns having acquired that mastery of clothing design she honed at Valentino, as well as accessories. The assignment’s deep resonance with her own history offers Chiuri scope to insert more autobiographical and personally-drawn aesthetic touches into the collections of a house in which, after all, she grew up. Unlike Dior, which carries so much solemnity and weight thanks to its symbolic importance in the French fashion system, Fendi is a much more malleable entity. All this is why Maria Grazia Chiuri’s new role at Fendi has the potential to be her most powerful chapter of all.