On the evening of July 9, Fendi will stage its couture show at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art — the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea — marking the debut of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s first couture collection for the Roman house and the first Fendi couture presentation to be held in the Italian capital since 2019. The choice of venue is significant: housed in the monumental Palazzo delle Belle Arti near Villa Borghese since 1915, the institution represents a deliberate turn toward Chiuri’s own Roman roots and a departure from the Parisian couture calendar that has anchored Fendi’s haute offerings for decades.
The show will coincide with the opening of After, Un Percorso di Lavoro. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985, a public exhibition that traces the late designer’s creative partnership with the house through his 1985 archive. Running from July 10 through October 25, the exhibition offers a rare temporal compression of Lagerfeld’s design methodology: sketches, toiles, fabric swatches, and finished pieces from a single pivotal year, displayed alongside archival photography and correspondence. The curatorial premise — a deep dive into one year of a fifty-year collaboration — treats Lagerfeld’s Fendi tenure as a continuous thread rather than a series of discrete collections, foregrounding the iterative nature of his process.
For Chiuri, the Rome couture show represents a homecoming in multiple registers. Born in Rome, she studied at the Istituto Europeo di Design before building her career at Valentino and later Dior, where she spent nearly a decade as creative director of women’s wear. Her appointment at Fendi in 2024 was framed as a return to the house’s Roman DNA — a counterweight to the increasingly globalized identity of LVMH’s brands. The couture presentation, staged in a museum that holds work by the very modernists who shaped Chiuri’s early design education, reinforces that narrative: this is a Roman designer, making Roman clothes, shown in a Roman institution.
The decision to hold couture outside of Paris carries strategic weight. Fendi has presented couture in Rome twice before — in 2016 and 2019, both under Lagerfeld’s creative direction — but the 2026 show arrives at a moment when the geography of fashion is being actively renegotiated. Brands are increasingly staging destination shows that function as brand-building exercises for host cities as much as product launches for the maison. Fendi’s Rome show, in particular, reads as an assertion of Italian luxury craftsmanship against the centralized dominance of Parisian couture, a positioning that resonates with the current political momentum behind Italian fashion’s global identity. The National Gallery, which holds one of Italy’s most important collections of modern art, provides the cultural gravity to match that ambition.
The Karl Lagerfeld exhibition adds an emotional layer to what might otherwise be read as a purely strategic play. Lagerfeld’s relationship with Fendi spanned more than half a century, from his appointment as creative director of fur in 1965 to his final collection in 2019. The 1985 focus is a deliberate curatorial choice: that year saw Lagerfeld produce some of his most audacious work for the house, including the first iterations of the double-F logo as a woven pattern and the exaggerated fur silhouettes that would define the brand’s maximalist period. By anchoring the exhibition in a single year, Fendi invites visitors to see Lagerfeld’s process — the refinements, the dead ends, the leaps — rather than the polished final products that typically populate brand exhibitions. For a house entering a new creative chapter, it is a generous gesture: a celebration of the past that makes space for the future.
