Maria Grazia Chiuri has officially unveiled her first Couture collection for FENDI, presenting the Fall/Winter 2026–2027 show inside Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea—a venue that holds special significance in the House’s history.

Chiuri chose to begin with a dialogue between fashion, art, and memory. Her couture debut reflects on the relationship between clothing and the body, presenting couture as something that responds to movement, emotion, and identity rather than existing solely as an object of beauty.

The setting reinforced that dialogue. More than four decades after FENDI and Karl Lagerfeld transformed the museum into one of Italy’s first institutional spaces dedicated to fashion, Chiuri revisited that landmark by reconstructing the 1985 exhibition Steps Through Work. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985. Restaged in its entirety, the exhibition allows contemporary audiences to experience a defining chapter of the House’s creative legacy through a new lens.

The excitement extended well beyond the runway. The front row brought together an impressive roster of guests, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Monica Bellucci, Jessica Alba, and Danny Ramirez, underscoring the anticipation surrounding Chiuri’s first couture collection for the Roman house.

By pairing a couture debut with the revival of an important cultural project, Chiuri signals that her vision for FENDI extends beyond the runway. It is one that looks to the archive not as a place of nostalgia, but as a living source of ideas—where history and contemporary expression continue to shape one another.