Maria Grazia Chiuri begins her term on Fendi Sewing with desire. For Autumn Winter 2026, he treats it as a physical and emotional force, something conveyed through posture, touch, movement and the way fabric meets the body. The collection avoids presenting desire as a challenge alone. Instead, Chiuri associates it with sensuality, freedom, pleasure and the ability to dress without restriction.
The starting point comes through Histoire d’eau, Jacques de Bascher’s 1977 film commissioned by Karl Lagerfeld for his first Fendi ready-to-wear collection. The image of a German woman moving through Rome with an air of innocent sensuality gives Chiuri a historical reference without turning the collection into an immediate revival. The film provides an attitude: free, playful, self-possessed and indifferent to rigid definitions of femininity.
Chiuri builds the collection around clothes that follow the body rather than discipline it. Chiffon dresses with black and white striped inserts glide along the figure, while draping creates a corset-free shape. This refusal of visible limitation becomes one of the clearest ideas of the collection. Garments sculpt through fall, weight and movement, allowing the form to emerge through the wearer rather than through an imposed internal structure.
The perimeter of the kimono appears on jackets and coats for women and men, extending Chiuri’s argument for wet dressing. Velvet and grain de poudre add weight to these pieces, though the construction avoids stiffness. Shapes remain open and generous, creating a wardrobe that moves between genders without turning fluidity into a decorative theme.
The collection becomes more compelling when Chiuri turns her attention to the ateliers. It treats garment production as a collaborative system where different forms of know-how confront and reshape each other. Fur, leather, fabric, tulle and embroidery are not divided into separate categories. They exchange functions. Fur becomes a feather. Tulle becomes a structure. Leather turns into a design that travels to cashmere.
This material instability produces several of the strongest images in the collection. Black and white fur stripes held by tulle reduce bulk until the fur appears almost weightless. Cloaks and capes bear arabesques that evolve into leaves, feathers and flowers of leather, fur and cloth. On the shoulders of men, these forms take on the protective quality of blankets or shelters. Elsewhere, variations in fur suggest butterfly wings, while leather traces labyrinthine lines on a double-faced white cashmere coat.
Chiuri’s language remains clearest when material and concept support each other. The idea of abstraction gives the fur an unknown lightness, while the absence of a corset gives the draping a direct relationship to the body. At times, however, the collection’s language of desire risks becoming broader than the clothes themselves. Sensuality, freedom, pleasure, and bodily autonomy carry significant conceptual weight, and the strongest looks succeed because they translate these ideas into construction rather than relying on them as explanation.
Her first Fendi Couture collection establishes a measured position. Chiuri does not go after shock or theatrical exaggeration. It proposes tailoring as a practice that responds to and is shaped by the people who make the clothes and the bodies that inhabit them. The result feels less interested in fantasy as an escape and more interested in physical presence.
For Fendi, this direction gives tailoring a new intimacy. Desire occurs through movement, surface and contact. It does not require exposure or containment. It exists in the freedom to inhabit a garment on one’s own terms.
