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This is a cultural problem, and a political problem,” said Maria Grazia Chiuri ahead of her first haute couture catwalk show for Fendi.

The problem, as she sees it, is Italy’s unwillingness to acknowledge fashion’s role in culture by giving it space in museums. To challenge this, she bookended her Rome catwalk event with two fashion exhibitions in the city.

A show of Karl Lagerfeld’s early designs for Fendi that ran briefly in 1985 has been revived at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, the venue where Chiuri was showing, while a second exhibition at a different Rome location will bring together Fendi haute couture collections since 2015.

A Chiuri catwalk always has a point to make. During her decade at Dior, she made feminist slogan T-shirts and gave a space to local female writers and artists when staging destination shows around the world. She intends to use the Fendi platform to interrogate the assumptions of a country that takes fashion seriously as a business but not as an art form.

“I remember seeing the 1985 exhibition. It changed so much for me, but it was highly criticised,” she recalled, pointing out to reporters from the UK, France and US that Italy had no equivalent to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, or the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, all of which regularly stage high-profile fashion exhibitions.

Rome is Chiuri’s home town, the city where she was born and to which she returned at weekends while working in Paris. It is also where five Fendi sisters, Paola, Carla, Franca, Anna and Alda, took over their parents’ fur and leather boutique in the 1940s and turned it into a global luxury brand.

Moving to Milan would have been better for business, but Rome is “our great love, a city with a story on every street corner”, recalled Paola Fendi, now 95, earlier this year.

There was a distinctively Roman flavour of power dressing to Chiuri’s couture debut. “I love a cape – probably because in Rome, we have the Vatican,” the designer said before the show. A full length ivory caped coat, silk embroidery sweeping the floor, captured the grandeur of the eternal city; but it would also have looked at home on the red carpet – a corridor of power of another kind. There was black lace, both solemnly layered and daringly sheer, and trailing ecclesiastical sleeves with wide contrast satin cuffs.

The silhouette was free flowing, shapes suspended from the shoulder. “Completely different from the other couture house where I worked”, noted Chiuri, referring to the hourglass “New Look” silhouette with which Dior is associated. For this collection, the designer said she had been inspired by kimono shapes, and clothing traditions that create shape by draping around the body, rather than compressing flesh.

There was real fur on the catwalk, although upcycled from pelts and garments in the Fendi archive. “Fur is durable, and I think we should use it up,” said Chiuri. Fendi’s roots in the fur trade, which once gave the label an aura of glamour, have become an image problem which Chiuri will need to tackle as part of her brief to grow the Fendi brand, which is much smaller than its LVMH stablemate Dior. At Dior, where she served as the house’s first female creative director from 2016 to 2025, she almost quadrupled Dior’s revenues, from €2.2bn (£1.9bn) in 2017 to €9bn in 2024.