Milan Fashion Week: Kim Jones honours Fendi history, Francesco Risso celebrates unconventional beauty, and Max Mara embraces earth tones

Sep 19 , 2024

Models on the runway at the end of Fendi’s womenswear spring/summer 2025 show at Milan Fashion Week. Photo: AFP

Read on for our highlights from Milan Fashion Week so far, from Kim Jones’ tribute to Fendi’s 5 sisters, to Marni’s ode to beauty from the unconventional perspective of Francesco Risso

Milan Fashion Week is under way in the capital of Italian fashion, where luxury behemoths such as Prada and Gucci vie for attention with smaller labels that specialise in beautifully made leather goods that are at the heart of the country’s fashion system.

Here are some of the highlights from the first three days.

A sheer, heavily embellished dress paired with boots made in collaboration with Red Wing at the Fendi spring/summer 2025 show. Photo: AFP

Since joining Fendi as women’s creative director in 2020, British designer Kim Jones has often paid homage to the women in the Fendi family – from Silvia Fendi, who still designs accessories and menswear for the Italian brand, to her daughter Delfina, in charge of jewellery.

This season, he looked back to the history of Fendi and the five sisters who built it into the quintessential Roman luxury brand.

The show opened with touching piano music interspersed with various recordings of one of the sisters, Anna, and her daughter Silvia talking about the meaning of fashion and reminiscing about the early days of Fendi.

Referencing the year Fendi was founded, 1925, Jones had the 1920s in mind: art deco, flappers, Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

A model walks the runway during the Fendi collection show at Milan’s Fashion Week Womenswear Spring / Summer 2025. Photo: AFP

Intricately embellished sheer flapper dresses, ultra luxurious separates in crocodile leather, silk nightgowns and fur coats that had the easiness of robes – all in a muted palette – evoked a kind of serenity we haven’t seen in Jones’ work in a while now.

Unsurprisingly for a house so steeped in savoir faire and craftsmanship, each outfit was accessorised with plenty of bags – most models carried at least two – while stand-out footwear included Red Wing boots (part of an upcoming collaboration with the American bootmaker) that provided a much-needed counterpoint to the ethereal outfits.