Forty-one years ago, Karl Lagerfeld, then-creative director of Fendi, mounted an exhibition at the National Gallery Of Modern And Contemporary Art in Rome, the city where the brand was born and is based.
Titled Steps Through Work – an effort to show the public the art that went into the creation of a fur coat, from sketch to realisation – it caused a scandal.
Though not for the reasons one might assume.
The problem wasn’t the pelts. This was 1985, after all. Fur was still a legitimate part of a luxury wardrobe, at least for the majority of aspirational shoppers.
The problem was the idea that fashion would merit inclusion in a museum.
So it was a pointed choice that Maria Grazia Chiuri, for her first couture show for Fendi, decided to eschew Paris to recreate that exhibition in the exact same museum and with almost the exact same display – to show both what has changed and what has stayed the same.
Read more: From Hong Kong to the Paris runway, Robert Wun is living the couture dream
It’s shocking now to see fur on a runway, even if, as at Fendi, all that mink and sable and fox has been upcycled; repurposed from pieces in the archives, bought back from clients or just bits and pieces lying around.
On the other hand, there’s a lot less of it in the current collection than there used to be, and the whole idea of “craft” has been broadened to reach far beyond skins to velvet, silk, lace and so on.
Or at least that’s what Chiuri’s couture show, also held in the museum, demonstrated.
Like the sketches and piecework on the walls and in the vitrines of the fashion exhibition, her clothes offered an argument of their own about what, exactly, qualifies as – if not art, at least as couture.
If in her former job as creative director of Dior, she made feminism central to her vision (for better and sometimes for worse), in her new post she seems to be elevating materials in the same way.
It might be a more convincing sell.
Indeed, Chiuri said in a preview, since taking charge at Fendi last fall she had realised “the material is part of the process of creating".
As she put it: "It’s really the starting point.”
And that, she said, was unlike her experience at any other couture house, where design begins with the structure and the fabric follows.
At Fendi, she said, the structure serves the fabric. So much so that when a reporter asked about the construction of a garment, Chiuri laughed.
“There is no construction,” she said.
She wasn’t exaggerating. There also weren’t any bright colours, big gowns or sparkles. There were barely even any waists.
What there was was a minimalist, monochrome parade of liquid pants and caftans; a focus on tactility – the feeling of how fabric slithers against, or floats around, skin – above almost everything else; the occasional menswear look; and intricately worked fabrics.
A simple black dress that began as Chantilly lace then segued into the same lacy whorls, but in leather. A long, almost hippie-like vest was composed of hundreds of tiny white fur petals.
There were robelike jackets and transparent 1920s shifts atop slick white trousers.
The kind of clothes that don’t necessarily telegraph “art”, but definitely telegraph “art collector”.
“Lightness” as a value in clothing has been parroted by so many designers this past week that it has started to seem like a cliche.
Read more: Malaysian heritage represented through adaptive fashion at V&A exhibition
Yes, when the world is heavy you want to go easy, and yadda, yadda, yadda. But in this case, it was a legitimate description of what was on the Fendi runway.
Not just because so many looks seemed to be a single layer of sheer mousseline atop little lace nothings (that is less “lightness” than seminudity).
But because Chiuri seems to have genuinely figured out how to take on the weighty history of a brand that was never much about shape or even logo, but rather raw material, and instead of ignoring it or apologising for it, redefine it.
After all, when Lagerfeld defiantly introduced couture to the brand 11 years ago, it wasn’t couture, it was haute fourrure, or high fur, and outside the venue there were protests and a buggy covered in fake blood.
Now almost every other house has renounced the stuff. Chiuri, however, has found another way.
That’s progress. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
