Story by Editor-at-Large Carolina Ogliaro
Rousteing Decides to Leave for a New Path
After fourteen years at the helm, Olivier Rousteing leaves Balmain having rewritten what it means to lead a heritage house in the twenty-first century.
His tenure wasn’t defined simply by silhouettes and embellishment but by a cultural shift: luxury seen through the lens of identity, visibility and audacity.
Rousteing turned the brand into a stage for modernity and self-expression, merging the intimacy of personal narrative with global pop spectacle.
His exit closes a chapter where fashion became conversation and conviction, and it opens a rare moment of stillness, for Balmain to rediscover its voice and for Rousteing to decide where his instinct for provocation and beauty will carve its next path.
Maria Grazia Chiuri returns home… to Fendi, to Rome, to the place where her story first began.
Appointed as the new Chief Creative Officer, she steps into the house’s next chapter with a kind of poetic symmetry: the woman who once helped shape its early accessories legacy now inherits its full creative reign.
Her arrival marks more than a change of direction but it’s a restoration of soul. Known for her deeply human approach to fashion, where craftsmanship meets conviction, Chiuri has long used design as language, a dialogue on femininity, strength, and cultural memory.
At Fendi, she will find fertile ground for that vision: leather turned architecture, intimacy meeting Roman grandeur. Expect not just a new aesthetic, but a new narrative, one that ties the maison’s past and its future with the same invisible thread that has always run through Chiuri’s work: purpose.
