By Aaron Kok - published
Fashion has spent the past few seasons tidying itself up, and across the runways, wardrobes are being reduced into systems: the perfect coat, the useful trouser, the shirt that earns its keep. At Fendi, Maria Grazia Chiuri started one layer closer to skin. Her spring/summer 2027 collection began with underwear, that private architecture worn before an outfit has even decided what it wants to be.
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It was a fitting entry point for a collection concerned with the body and who gets to control its visibility. Fendi’s notes describe clothing as a “second skin”, porous to emotion, and propose bodies that can be strong and fragile, masculine and feminine, sometimes all at once. Bras, slips, lace rompers and bloomers therefore became more than styling devices. They were the collection’s foundation, surfaces to cover, expose and rearrange at will.
Chiuri made the audience work for the view. Models moved inside a mirrored structure inspired by Luciano Fabro’s “Cubo di Specchi” artwork, their bodies fractured and multiplied across reflective panels while spectators caught themselves looking back. There is something deliciously perverse about making a fashion audience squint at a fashion show. Yet the obstruction served the thesis. Clothes, bodies and observers became part of the same image, with no clean boundary between the person looking and the person being looked at.
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Once the looks came into focus, the temperature was markedly higher than Chiuri’s previous Fendi ready-to-wear outing. Black remained the anchor, but it was interrupted by salmon pink, yellow and dusty turquoise, plus leopard and flashes of metallic embroidery. A mint lace-trimmed bralette appeared with matching bloomer shorts; elsewhere, silk romper shorts edged in lace pushed the underwear-as-outerwear proposition further. Long black dresses clung and released in turns, some carved open at the back with grommeted cut-outs. Plunging sheer dresses exposed lace underneath, while striped shirts loosened almost to the point of collapse at the chest.
The sensuality was strongest when softness met something harder. Fluid dresses rubbed against frogging details, while slouchy denim and flat sandals gave the more decorative pieces a welcome scruffiness. Leather collars circled the neck, cuffs bracketed bare arms and jewel-encrusted shoes and buckled heels brought sparkle with a faintly dangerous edge. It was boudoir dressing after dark, once the polite guests have gone home and everyone loosened a button or five.
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Raffaella Carrà hovered over the collection as both soundtrack and spirit, with her track “Rumore” mixed alongside Adriano Celentano’s song titled “Prisencolinensinainciusol”. The reference gave Chiuri a useful kind of Italian sensuality: theatrical, knowingly camp and never especially interested in behaving. Headscarves, beaded surfaces, lingerie and glints of embellishment carried a hint of the nightclub without tipping the collection into costume. The body remained the constant, sometimes veiled in sheer silk, sometimes framed by lace, sometimes sharpened by military-inspired tailoring.
The bags joined in, as iconic Baguettes arrived sequinned, fringed and patterned, with Chiuri also shrinking one into a phone-sized proposition that feels less like storage than punctuation. A leopard-sequin Peekaboo dialled up the after-hours mood. If the clothes played with how much of the body to reveal, the accessories understood that seduction also benefits from a little excess.
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The finale distilled the idea neatly, as Mona Tougaard closed in a fluid silk dress whose slouched, translucent upper half exposed a lace bralette beneath, with black leather cuffs sharpening the softness. It looked almost unfinished in motion, as though the act of getting dressed had been deliberately interrupted halfway through.
That tension ran through the collection, and makes this runway outing an interesting counterpoint to primness. Where designers have been tightening the wardrobe, Chiuri approached the same impulse from underneath as lingerie became the recurring base note that allows everything above it to mutate through texture, proportion and gender. The shared wardrobe she has been developing at Fendi gained a more intimate vocabulary, and tonight, Chiuri’s most convincing proposition was simple: getting dressed can begin with the body, but the body gets the final say.