One year after her return to the Roman fashion house, Maria Grazia Chiuri makes her first official U.S. visit for the Croissant bag’s Los Angeles relaunch, reflecting on her creative evolution and vision for the future.

On a Thursday morning at a famed, tucked-away Los Angeles hotel, the Italian designer is reflecting on a career that has brought her back to where it all started: Fendi. The visit marks her first official trip to the U.S. since returning to the Roman fashion house.

It has been a year and a day since her appointment as chief creative officer was revealed on Oct. 14, 2025, marking a homecoming more than three decades after she first joined the company in 1989.

At 62, following 17 years at Valentino and nine at Christian Dior, where she became the first woman to lead the house’s women’s collections, Chiuri returns to Fendi with a new perspective.

“I’m a completely different person. I have different experiences, so probably I see the same place with different eyes,” she said.

Yet one lesson from her earliest days at Fendi has remained constant: the importance of collaboration. It’s a philosophy that has become central to her work, embodied in “Meno io, più noi” — “less I, more us” — a belief that creativity is a collective pursuit.

“I feel today the responsibility to give back my experience at a company where I learned so much at the beginning of my career,” she said.

It’s a mindset she absorbed early on from the five Fendi sisters — Anna, Carla, Paola, Franca and Alda — daughters of founders Adele and Edoardo Fendi.

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