Some debuts announce a new era. Others, quieter and more profound, feel like a homecoming. For Maria Grazia Chiuri, presenting her first collection as FENDI’s Chief Creative Officer, it was unmistakably the latter. Decades after cutting her teeth within the house’s ateliers, Chiuri returned not as an outsider staking new territory, but as a daughter of the Maison rediscovering her own proud inheritance.
“Meno io, più noi” or “Less I, More Us,” became her governing motto, and it is more than a clever turn of phrase. It is a distillation of how Chiuri works, and, she suggests, how FENDI itself has always worked. In an industry increasingly obsessed with singular auteur narratives, Chiuri’s opening statement felt almost radical in its humility.
That philosophy extended into the show’s very structure. Rather than treat masculine and feminine as opposing categories, Chiuri dissolved the distinction entirely, sending men and women down the runway together, in wardrobes built not to divide but to describe shared qualities. It was a wardrobe imagined as “a personal geography,” in Chiuri’s own words, one where clothes function as encounters, as memory, as evidence of a life lived through fashion rather than dressed in it.
In short, the collection carried a quieter, more tactile message about permanence. Chiuri showcased a selection of tailored blazers, cargo pants, sheer dresses, motorcycle jackets, Canadian tuxedos, and jumpsuits. Naturally, there was fur, as one would expect from FENDI, but presented in a vintage way.
Expert tailors rebuilt it, transforming pieces “left to lie in a wardrobe” into contemporary silhouettes that honour rather than discard their history. In an age of instant fashion and disposable cycles, Chiuri frames this act of remaking as one of dedication to memory, to the self who once wore the garment and the self who wears it now.
However, the real stars of the show were arguably all the Baguettes. Timed to coincide with Chiuri’s Fall/Winter 2026-27 debut, the Baguette returns to its original silhouette and style code, 26424, the exact specification that turned a “small and simple” arm-carried bag into a cultural manifesto back in the late 1990s. Born as a rebellion against the era’s clean minimalism, the Baguette became an instant object of desire precisely because it dared to be loud where everything else stayed quiet, with bold colour and experimental materials as a statement of self rather than conformity.
That same spirit of self-expression also anchors and coincides with the house’s new campaign for the Baguettes, photographed by Bibi Borthwick. Sarah Jessica Parker, Emma D’Arcy, Jessica Alba, Iris Law, Tecla Insolia, and FENDI ambassadors Bang Chan, Song Yuqi, Ren Meguro, and MINA each appear with a Baguette of their choosing, styled to reflect who they are in that exact moment. Borthwick’s approach favoured intimacy over artifice, letting each subject move and exist naturally, so that the bag became less a prop than a personality.
The results speak in fragments, culminating, fittingly, in the line that started it all: Carrie Bradshaw’s insistence that It’s Not a Bag, it’s a Baguette®. Nearly three decades later, under Chiuri’s direction, that declaration feels less like nostalgia and more like a promise renewed.
All things considered, what ultimately emerged was not simply a debut collection but a philosophy laid bare: fashion as a space of relationship rather than performance, desire made visible and tactile, individuality preserved even as it dissolves into collective vision. Chiuri closed her statement with a line that could just as easily summarise the whole show: a personal vision of fashion, and of oneself. For FENDI, and for the woman returning to lead it into its next chapter, that feels like exactly the right place to begin.
