Fendi has announced that Maria Grazia Chiuri’s first haute couture collection for the house will be presented on July 9 at Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, marking a homecoming for the Roman brand and a significant moment in the couture calendar. The show will coincide with the opening of ‘Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985,’ an exhibition running from July 10 to October 25 that revisits the landmark show the German designer staged at the same venue four decades ago.
Chiuri, who joined Fendi in early 2025 after a celebrated tenure at Dior, has kept her creative direction close to the vest. Industry speculation points toward a collection that leverages Fendi’s Roman identity—the marble, the light, the architectural proportion of the city—as the organizing principle. Her Dior work demonstrated a deep understanding of heritage as a tool for forward motion, and expectations are high for her translation of that approach to Fendi’s particular register of Italian luxury.
The choice of venue is rich with historical resonance. In 1985, Karl Lagerfeld transformed the National Gallery into a stage for what was then the most ambitious Fendi show ever mounted, featuring 148 looks that established the house’s fur-and-leather vocabulary on an international stage. The upcoming exhibition will reconstruct that moment through archival pieces, sketches, and photographs, creating a direct dialogue between Lagergeld’s vision and Chiuri’s inaugural couture offering.
For the fashion industry, the combination of Chiuri’s couture debut and the Lagerfeld retrospective offers a rare opportunity to see a house’s past and future in the same geographic frame. The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana—Fendi’s Roman headquarters—will host related events during couture week, turning the Eternal City into an extension of the Paris runway calendar. The July 9 show is likely to be one of the season’s most closely watched presentations.
The couture show arrives at a moment of transformation for Fendi. Under the leadership of chairman and CEO Serge Brunschwig, the brand has been reorienting its product strategy toward higher-margin categories, including an expanded couture and made-to-order business. Chiuri’s appointment was the creative anchor of that strategy, and the Rome show is the first public test of whether the bet pays off.
