FENDI Spring/Summer 2027: Before Designing Clothes, Maria Grazia Chiuri Looks to the Body

Clothes are made for the body. But whose body, exactly? Is it strong or vulnerable? Masculine or feminine? Does it want to be seen—or concealed?

For FENDI’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection, Maria Grazia Chiuri begins not with a new silhouette or a new material, but with the body itself—the body that wears the clothes.

Courtesy of FENDI
For Chiuri, the contemporary body resists a single definition. It holds strength and vulnerability at once, exists where the masculine and feminine meet, and changes through its relationships with others. This idea finds expression in a line by the poet E.E. Cummings:

“I like my body when it is with your body”

Rather than understanding the body in isolation, we come to recognize our own through encounters with others. From this perspective, Chiuri approaches clothing not simply as something that covers the body, but as an emotionally porous “second skin.”

Liberating Underwear from the Need to Stay Hidden

The starting point is men’s and women’s underwear. Underwear usually exists beneath clothing, occupying the layer closest to the body. Yet it is also an intermediary between the body and the outside world—something that can conceal or reveal. Chiuri brings this inner layer outward, elevating it through lace, embroidery, and a spectrum of color.

Courtesy of FENDI
In one key look, black lingerie emerges beneath a top that appears almost like a white shirt stripped back to its essentials. In another, a pale salmon-pink slip dress becomes a garment for the outside world in its own right. What is shown and what is concealed are no longer determined by convention, but by the body wearing the clothes.

Here, lingerie is not simply about exposing the body to someone else’s gaze. Instead, it becomes an expression of the freedom to choose how—and whether—to reveal oneself.

Courtesy of FENDI
Behind this idea stands Raffaella Carrà, an icon of Italian pop culture. More than her stage costumes, it is her assertion of independence—in desire, in the way she lived, and in the way she thought—that resonates with the vision of femininity running through the collection.

Dressing the Space Between Masculine and Feminine

If the body cannot be confined to a single definition, neither should the clothes placed upon it be required to follow a single category.

Menswear and womenswear. Tailoring and lingerie. Lightness and weight. Gloss and matte. Silk and animal print. Lace, embroidery, and intarsia. Velvet and parchment. Punk and bourgeois.

For Spring/Summer 2027, elements that would ordinarily belong to different categories continually intermingle on the same body.

Courtesy of FENDI
In a look combining denim, shirting, and tailoring, the familiar outlines of each garment begin to loosen, as lengths shift and layers fall out of alignment. Rather than resolving into an established reading of either masculine or feminine, a different conception of the body emerges somewhere in between. Crucially, neither side is given precedence.

Courtesy of FENDI
This is not about adding femininity to masculinity, nor about making womenswear more masculine. Different elements remain equal, becoming a single style through the body of the person who wears them. There is no hierarchy dictating what should be worn or how, and no pressure to conform.

Looking into the Mirror—and Discovering Others

The mirrors surrounding the runway also carry particular significance. The setting draws inspiration from Italian artist Luciano Fabro’s Cubo di specchi (Mirror Cube). A mirror is ordinarily a surface through which we look at ourselves. Here, however, the models, the audience, and the surrounding space are reflected again and again, multiplying a single body into many images.

Courtesy of FENDI
What appears in the mirror is not the self alone. It is the person beside us, someone beyond them, and the space in which self and others exist together.

Here, Cummings’s words—“I like my body when it is with your body”—begin to take on another dimension. The body does not exist in isolation. Our perception of our own bodies changes through distance, gaze, and contact with others. The mirror shifts from a device for confirming the self into one through which the self can be discovered in relation to others.

Beginning with the Body, Rather Than Constraining It

Fashion has long reshaped the body. It has constricted, lifted, concealed, and emphasized it, bringing the body closer to the silhouette idealized by a particular era. Throughout its history, there have been times when clothing came first and the body was expected to adapt.

What Chiuri proposes at FENDI this season is a reversal of that order.

Courtesy of FENDI
First, there is the body.

A body that holds both strength and vulnerability, forms relationships with others, chooses for itself what to reveal and conceal, and moves freely between masculinity and femininity. Begin with that body, and lingerie no longer has to remain underneath; a dressing gown no longer belongs only indoors; and the boundaries separating menswear from womenswear begin to lose their meaning.

Courtesy of FENDI
Rather than clothing defining the body, the body’s desires begin to transform the clothes.

That is why FENDI’s “second skin” for Spring/Summer 2027 is not a shell that confines the body. It is a skin that allows emotion to pass through, welcomes others, mixes disparate elements, and changes along with the person who inhabits it.

What Maria Grazia Chiuri proposes at FENDI is not clothing that suppresses the body, but clothing that celebrates its freedom.