Fendi renewed and rigorous, the romantic refuge of Marras

The second day of the Milan fashion shows is a time of debuts, confirmations, comebacks and restarts. Fresh from her successes at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri makes her debut as creative director of Fendi having in fact been very familiar with the Roman maison, where she had her first professional experience, remaining for ten years, from 1989 to 1999.

"I left just before the sale to Lvmh,' she recalls, rattling off anecdotes about the unique atmosphere in those offices, which was one of freedom and openness to experimentation, but also of commercial shrewdness. These are all qualities that she herself possesses, and which she can now exercise with decision-making flair, being in the command post - by mandate, precisely, of Lvmh. In this sense, the new collegial slogan 'less me, more us'', although catchy, sounds a little too easy: to break down the ego in the fashion rooms is wishful thinking. Pragmatism, and an enviable clarity of vision, are Chiuri's real strength. Her Fendi, presented in co-ed mode, imagining in many ways a wardrobe shared between her and him, with lots of tailoring and cargo trousers with a lesbian-chic flavour, is not surprising, but convincing.

The woman, in particular, is the same one Chiuri had imagined for Dior, but reinterpreted in a Roman key, i.e. deprived of the pompous rigidity and poses of the ladies of Avenue Montaigne to gain a healthy sensuality, a sly softness. Of course, blackness is rampant, eccentricity and dreaminess disappear, but the amalgam works as a good product. Less convincing is the insistence on female artistic collaborations, widely experimented by Dior.

Now in his second try-out, Simone Bellotti, from Jil Sander, boldly focuses his personal idea of a maison based on reductionism in the context of today's fashion, made up of porous languages and formulas from which many often surreptitiously appropriate. He renounces the clinical but perhaps impersonal purity of his debut collection to explore a series of highly personal contradictions summed up by the question: can the superfluous be essential? The answer is affirmative. Here then is an alternation of hard, masculine silhouettes and feminine twists; the undulating movement created by excess fabric and the flashing of the body through vertical slits on skirts and dresses. One senses a subtle tension, electrifying the whole with a seditious vibrancy that is now ready to break through, unhinging aseptic purism.

Antonio Marras is an eternal nostalgic: it is among the old things, in the attic, that he finds the cue to imagine the new, dressing women with a melancholic and cinematographic allure, who seem to have stepped out of a 1940s film. It is all a bloom of wild roses, with an immediate metaphor to follow: thorny delicacy, spines that protect what is fragile and delicate. In other words: pure Marras.