At Fendi, a 1970s Pop Legend Takes the Lead

Maria Grazia Chiuri's Fendi collection, shown during Milan Fashion Week, took as its subject Raffaella Carrà, the Italian singer and television presenter, according to The Guardian. The paper described a show of diaphanous dresses and visible bras that celebrated Carrà as an "incredible feminist" of the 1970s, and quoted Chiuri saying she has worn less of a uniform since leaving Paris for her native Rome.

The Guardian's account places the collection in a lineage of Italian popular culture rather than in the usual fashion-week references. Carrà, who died in 2021, was a mainstream television figure for decades, and her presence at a luxury house is a statement about which Italian past the industry now chooses to market.

Milan Fashion Week has produced a run of shows with strong thematic spines this season. The Guardian reported separately that Prada, under Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, gave skirts the star billing and swerved trousers and dresses, a formula the paper traced to Prada's own uniform of a knee-length skirt and a plain sweater.

The two Guardian dispatches, taken together, describe a Milan season organised around a single garment and a single woman. At Prada the skirt was the argument; at Fendi the argument was Carrà, presented by a designer who has framed her move back to Rome as a loosening of her own dress code. Neither report claims a commercial result, and this dispatch does not either.

For Tuscany the connection is not the runway but the supply chain beneath it. Florence and its surrounding districts remain a centre of leather goods and small-batch manufacturing for Italian luxury houses, work that the foreign fashion press rarely photographs and the wire does not quantify here. The Guardian's reports mention no Tuscan workshop, factory or artisan by name, so no claim about a local order book can be made from them.

What the coverage does establish is a direction of travel in how Italian fashion presents itself abroad: not as novelty but as memory, drawn from the country's own broadcast and pop archive. Carrà is that archive at its most popular and least reverent, which is precisely why her adoption by a Roman house reads differently from the usual citation of cinema or aristocracy.

The Guardian noted Chiuri's remark about having more fun with clothes since returning to Rome from Paris. That sentence, more than any hemline, is the season's real editorial: the Italian houses are arguing that Italy itself is the material.