On 9 July Fendi will show its first couture collection by Maria Grazia Chiuri, who moved from Dior last October

On 9 July Fendi will show its first couture collection by Maria Grazia Chiuri, who moved from Dior last October. The venue is not Paris but Rome's National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, the GNAM. The gallery building itself is a former seventeenth-century monastery of the Discalced Carmelites.

To coincide with the show, the gallery will open the exhibition After un Percorso di Lavoro. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985.

This is already Fendi's third Roman couture show. In 2016, for the house's 90th anniversary, Lagerfeld staged a show directly above the water of the Trevi Fountain. In 2019 the show was held in the Temple of Venus, and the house donated 2.5 million euros towards the restoration of the site.

Fendi offers a good example of how one of the few genuinely important public functions of haute couture is fulfilled. A fashion house collaborates with museums or heritage sites and shows its collections on their premises, but also pays for work which the state usually cannot find the money for. I think that is how it should be: if couture is given as its backdrop a treasure that no money can buy, it ought to do more than simply pay rent for the space