Italian pop legend takes the lead in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Fendi assortment | Milan vogue week

Maria Grazia Chiuri has been having extra enjoyable with garments since she decamped from Paris again to her native Rome to work at Fendi. “I’ve much less of a uniform nowadays. I believe it’s as a result of being again right here makes me really feel younger once more. I’m undecided my daughter appreciates [this attitude]! But I don’t care,” she stated at a preview earlier than her Milan vogue week present.

Not that Chiuri doesn’t method her work as a designer severely. She described her second ready-to-wear season at Fendi not as a present, or a set, however as “the second a part of the mission I’m engaged on for them”.

She is continuous the protocol she developed because the designer of Dior of utilizing every occasion as a platform to rejoice ladies’s creativity. But as a substitute of a ceramicist or a thinker, her muse for this season is the Italian pop legend Raffaella Carrà.

Carrà, as soon as described as a “one-woman Abba”, had a Lady Gaga bob and a style for sequined catsuits. She brought about a sensation together with her raunchy outfits – the primary naked midriff ever seen on Italian TV, in 1970 – and her sex-positive lyrics (her music A Far L’Amore Comincia Tu interprets as “Take the lead when making love”).

“She was an unimaginable feminist, and her relationship together with her garments was so free,” stated Chiuri of Carrà, who died aged 78 in 2021.

On the catwalk, Carrà’s affect grew to become diaphanous Seventies attire with trailing hems, seen lace bras, embroidered waistcoats and classic fur stoles, whereas males’s shirts had been unbuttoned to the navel.

The largest and starriest present of this Milan fashion week belonged to not any designer, however to Vogue. Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan’s glass-domed cathedral to retail, grew to become a catwalk for a line-up that included Jennifer Lopez in Dolce & Gabbana and Cardi B in classic Versace, with the singer Alicia Keys and the ballet dancer Roberto Bolle performing stay.

Vogue is leaning into stay occasions to amplify its model and strengthen its coffers as print revenue declines. Vogue World Milano follows final yr’s Vogue World: Hollywood in LA, which generated $30m (£23m) in proceeds.

Billed as a celebration of Italian craftsmanship and the human contact in vogue, the occasion highlighted the stark actuality of an growing dependence on benefactors from Silicon Valley.

Sponsors of the occasion included Meta Glasses and OpenAI, and the finale included two dancing robots, who had been greeted with notably much less enthusiasm by the stellar line-up of Italian designers within the entrance row than the remainder of the present.

“The landlords have entered the chat,” learn one remark beneath a video of the robots circulating on social media.