“Fendi is craft.”

So believes Maria Grazia Chiuri, chief creative officer of the Italian brand, and for her first couture collection, this was as clear as the Roman blue skies on Thursday. The designer chose the Italian capital to unveil the lineup at one of her favorite museums, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, concurrently with the opening of a reproduction of a 1985 exhibition on the brand conceived by Karl Lagerfeld.

Indeed, the designs were a marvel of intarsia, laces and embroideries, a testimony of the exquisite manual skills of the Fendi artisans. Close up during a preview, the precision of these embellishments was mesmerizing.

“Fendi is a tactile, soft brand, because it was born as a furrier, so the material is fundamental here. Often you think of shapes and lines when you think of couture, as the materials were not an influence, but at Fendi, it’s the other way around, because the brand’s couture started from a specific material and not from shape or construction,” said Chiuri. (The Bar jacket at Dior, which Chiuri exited last year, came to mind). “The only way to do couture at Fendi is to align its essential values and elements, with shapes adapting to the materials. It is quite unique in this sense.”

She believes that “those who approach couture are looking for the experience of the clothes on the body and not because they are influenced by images.” To be sure, these are sophisticated garments that murmur rather than scream, to be appreciated for their refined polish — although Chiuri also indulged in some sensual transparencies.

Just as Lagerfeld and the formidable Fendi sisters — Paola, Alda, Carla, Franca and Anna — deconstructed the traditional fur coats in the 1960s and 1970s, Chiuri did all she could to offer clothes that do not constrain, “enveloping the body,” she said, and were as light as possible, such as a georgette dress with inlays in black and white strips of leather, another core material of the house. “This dress is an example of couture, it has to be constructed and reproportioned around each specific body, or this graphic motif would not be placed centrally,” Chiuri pointed out.

The kimono was a starting point, revisited in jackets with sartorial details and coats for women and men — continuing the shared wardrobe concept of her fall ready-to-wear collection — in velvet or  grain de poudre and lined in silk. Soft drapes contributed to sculptural silhouettes and dramatic cuts helped achieve super light coats and capes — the latter a clear reference to papal imagery so connected to Rome. Panne velvet was revisited in a soft Smoking. A mixed media trench was made with a very light cashmere worked double, unlined, with fur and leather intarsia details.

Tulle also formed the structure of cloaks, and intricate Deco arabesques on some of the dresses were references to Bauhaus and the Vienna Secession movement that influenced Lagerfeld over the years. A floor-length coat made with leftover fur and leather scraps that were turned into a floral motif was an absolute show-stopper and proof of the virtuosity of the artisans in a collaboration between the ateliers the designer was especially proud of.

The color palette hinged on black and parchment, one of the brand’s signature materials linked to its early days of luggage-making and also explored in the cruise 2027 collection. A pantsuit in this hue was highly representative of the 1970s and Lagerfeld’s admiration for Marlene Dietrich and the Fendi sisters, emancipated, free working women.

“My intention was to do couture for today, for women of today also because the Fendi sisters always represented contemporary women, it was their attitude. I worked with all of them, and even today you see this contemporary attitude. They are not nostalgic, they live in their times. To me, they are a point of reference on how to approach life. Their background is not so far from mine,” said Chiuri, who kicked off her career at Fendi in 1989, before moving to Valentino and then Dior.

Chiuri clearly feels at home at Fendi, and is influenced by its history, by those who made it a successful brand and by the city of Rome. “I have had the opportunity to work with the founders of brands and felt their constructive spirit, there was no deadline, it was creativity in progress so we could experiment with fabrics in unusual combinations which leads to novelty,” she said. Lessons that have served her well.