{"id":21235,"date":"2026-05-23T05:48:32","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T05:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/21235\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T05:48:32","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T05:48:32","slug":"why-we-should-all-be-fendi-ists-maria-grazia-chiuri-comes-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/21235\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Should All Be Fendi-ists: Maria Grazia Chiuri Comes Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s news of Maria Grazia Chiuri\u2019s return to fashion has, predictably, sparked some snark. Despite\u2014or maybe because of?\u2014the designer\u2019s record as a heart-on-sleeve feminist and the most commercially successful woman fashion designer of the last decade, the prospect of her return to Fendi<\/a> nearly six months after departing Dior is prompting as many eye rolls online as drum rolls.<\/p>\n

I reckon that the eye rollers will be pivoting pretty soon. This Fendi placement<\/a> is far from arbitrary. Before she arrived at Dior<\/a> to almost quadruple sales over six years, and before she rose to her first creative directorship position alongside Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino, Chiuri learned her trade at Fendi. There is arguably no living fashion designer without Fendi in her name as deeply connected to the Roman house as her.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

Backstage at the resort 2026 Dior show.Photographed by Acielle\/Style Du Monde<\/p>\n

Chiuri, now 61, was raised in Rome by her seamstress turned-boutique-owner mother, and her military professional father. She graduated from Rome\u2019s Istituto Europeo di Design in the late 1980s and bagged her first job as an accessories designer at Fendi in 1989. It was there that she worked under \u201cle sorelle\u201d of Fendi sisters\u2014Paola, Anna, Franca, Carla, and Alda\u2014who were instrumental in building the house that had been founded by their parents Adele and Edoardo.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were a sorority,\u201d Chiuri once recalled. She spent the second half of her 20s and the first of her 30s in that sorority, a time during which she also became a mother herself: in interviews she has recalled breast-feeding her son in the Fendi studio, while her daughter Rachele amused herself rearranging the handbags in the sample room.<\/p>\n

Speaking in 2023 at Vogue Italia\u2019s Forces of Fashion event, Chiuri recalled: \u201cFendi was a great school and I think the thing I learned most from that company was cooperation, that of speaking in the plural: no one said I, everyone spoke about us.\u201d In another interview Chiuri described how she honed her craft during these Fendi years, saying: \u201cI was born an accessory designer. I love accessories. I obsess over them\u2014I really obsess. [At Fendi] we experimented in unexplored territory, making embroidered bags and shoes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Maria<\/p>\n

Maria Grazia Chiuri, Anna Fendi, Carla Fendi, and Pierpaolo Piccoli attend the Fendi Roma 90 Years Anniversary Welcome Cocktail on July 7, 2016 in Rome, Italy<\/p>\n

Jacopo M. Raule\/Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today\u2019s news of Maria Grazia Chiuri\u2019s return to fashion has, predictably, sparked some snark. Despite\u2014or maybe because of?\u2014the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21236,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12823],"tags":[12850,4955,12230,15880,12918,6775],"class_list":["post-21235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fendi","tag-fendi","tag-lvmh","tag-runway","tag-splitscreenimageleftfullbleed","tag-storytypenews-trending","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}