What's happening at Fendi this season
Fendi is working a very particular silhouette this season: the fitted cardigan worn as outerwear, the bias-cut slip skirt that sits at the natural waist, and a knee-high boot with enough structure to anchor both. It's not minimalism—there's too much texture for that—but it is a kind of editing. The house is asking what happens when you strip back the volume and let cut do the work.
The cardigans showed up first at the Fall/Winter 2024 presentation in February. Slim-fit, cropped at the hip, worked in ribbed cashmere or fine-gauge wool. Fendi styled them over slip dresses and under nothing, fastened with a single button or left open. This isn't the oversized boyfriend cardigan that's been everywhere since 2019. This is something closer to what Azzedine Alaïa did in the eighties: a second skin that follows the body without clinging. The construction matters here. The armholes are high, the shoulder seam sits exactly where your shoulder ends, and the ribbing doesn't stretch out after one wear. It's knitwear as tailoring.
The skirts came next. Bias-cut, which means they move when you move and require a slip unless you're committed to a certain level of transparency. Fendi showed them in silk charmeuse, in printed georgette, in a wool-silk blend that caught the light differently depending on where you stood in the room. They're mid-calf, mostly, though a few hit just below the knee. The waistband is clean—no pleats, no gathers, just a straight line that sits at the smallest part of the waist and then releases into the bias. This is the opposite of the low-slung, wide-waisted skirts that have dominated for the past two years. It changes your posture. You stand differently in a skirt that defines your waist.
The boots are doing something specific too. Knee-high, fitted through the calf, worked in supple leather that doesn't crease at the ankle. A low block heel, maybe an inch and a half, sometimes two. Fendi isn't alone here—Khaite showed a similar boot for Fall, and The Row has been working this shape for three seasons—but the house is leaning into it harder than most. The styling is deliberate: boot, skirt, cardigan, and very little else. No belt. No bag large enough to announce itself. The odd pair of gold hoops or a slim bangle, but mostly just the three pieces in conversation with each other.
This isn't about individual items. It's about a system. You could pull the cardigan, swap in a trouser, and still be in the vocabulary Fendi is building. Same with the skirt—it works under a blazer, under a trench, under a shearling coat if you're somewhere cold. The boot is the constant. It's the piece that holds the rest together, and it's the piece that requires the most commitment. A knee-high boot asks you to consider proportion every time you get dressed. It cuts your leg at a specific point and everything else has to respond.
Silvia Venturini Fendi has always understood the power of the wardrobe piece—the thing you return to because it works, not because it's new. The Peekaboo bag, introduced in 2008, is still in production because the structure holds and the hardware doesn't date. The Baguette, from 1997, had a resurgence in 2019 not because someone decided it was time but because the shape made sense again. These three pieces feel like they're being built with the same logic. They're not asking you to rethink how you dress. They're asking you to refine it.
There's a broader shift here, one that goes beyond Fendi. Phoebe Philo's debut collection in October leaned heavily on tailored knits and slim skirts. Jil Sander's Spring 2025 show was almost entirely composed of narrow silhouettes in solid colours. Even Loro Piana, which tends to move slowly, introduced a fitted cardigan-jacket hybrid this season that sold through in under two weeks. The industry is pulling back from volume, from the oversized blazer and the puddle pant, and moving toward something that requires more precision. It's harder to do well, which means it's harder to fake.
What it means to dress in this for the next twelve months is simple: you'll need to know your measurements, find a tailor who can take in a waist or shorten a sleeve by half an inch, and accept that ease and fit are not the same thing.
