Fendi Puts a 1970s Pop Legend at the Centre of Milan

Maria Grazia Chiuri's Fendi collection, shown during Milan Fashion Week, took the 1970s Italian pop star Raffaella Carrà as its presiding figure, according to The Guardian. The show, the paper reported, was full of diaphanous dresses and visible bras, and framed Carrà as an "incredible feminist" of her decade.

The Guardian noted that Chiuri has been having more fun with clothes since leaving Paris for her native Rome to work at Fendi, and quoted her saying she has "less of a uniform these days." The collection's centre of gravity, the paper wrote, was the skirt.

The Guardian's sister dispatch on Prada, published the same week, found Miuccia Prada and the Belgian designer Raf Simons likewise building their Milan collection around skirts rather than trousers or dresses. Two of the city's biggest houses converged on the same garment.

Carrà, who died in 2021, was a television presenter, singer and dancer whose career spanned five decades and whose stage costumes were as discussed in Italy as her songs. The Guardian's framing places her in a lineage of Italian women performers the foreign press treats as cultural exports, alongside figures in cinema and design. Chiuri's decision to name her as the collection's reference point is, in the paper's reading, a statement about who counts as a feminist icon.

The choice of Rome as Chiuri's base matters to the collection's texture. Fendi is a Roman house, and Chiuri returned to the city from Paris, where she had led another major label. The Guardian's correspondent treated the move as liberating for her design language, a shift from uniform to something looser.

For Umbria, the wire supports no direct link, and none is claimed here. The region's own fashion footprint is small and largely artisanal — leather workshops, textile finishing, the kind of small manufacturing that supplies larger houses without appearing on a Milan runway. That is a general fact about the region's economy, not something The Guardian reported, and it is offered as context rather than consequence.

What the foreign coverage does establish is a pattern across two Milan shows: the skirt as the season's organising garment, and a willingness among Italy's most prominent women designers to reach into the country's recent popular culture for material. The Guardian reported both the Fendi and Prada collections without drawing the parallel explicitly; the parallel is visible in the two dispatches read together.

Milan Fashion Week's foreign coverage tends to treat the city as a stage for arguments about gender, labour and heritage. This week's dispatches fit that pattern. Whether the skirt's prominence signals a durable shift or a single season's mood is not something the wire settles, and this dispatch does not either.