Between Shadows
Review of Fendi “Beyond the Mirror” Cruise 2027 Ad Campaign by Chief Creative Officer Maria Grazia Chiuri & Creative and Image Director Rachele Regini
Fendi Cruise 2027 arrives not with a passport stamp or sun-soaked escapism, but with the echo of heels on marble and the cool seduction of silence. For her first Cruise collection for the House, Maria Grazia Chiuri trades spectacle for atmosphere, presenting Oltre lo Specchio (“Beyond the Mirror”), a cinematic short directed by Davide Rosano that transforms fashion into something suspended between dream, memory, and architecture. Referencing Jacques de Bascher’s Histoire d’Eau, the 1977 film commissioned by Karl Lagerfeld to launch Fendi’s first ready-to-wear collection, Chiuri doesn’t attempt replication. Instead, she offers a whispered conversation across time — one spoken in shadow, geometry, and restraint.
The film unfolds like a fever dream moving through twentieth-century Rome. Its unnamed heroine, inspired by the protagonist Suzie from Histoire d’Eau, wanders through an austere rationalist building where mirrors fracture perspective and marble corridors seem to stretch infinitely into darkness. The soundtrack is sparse yet oddly hypnotic: the persistent click of stilettos becomes percussion, a rhythmic reminder that movement itself is narrative. Light spills in cool blue-grey tones, replacing the warmer noir glow of the lookbook with something icier, lonelier, and psychologically charged. The effect is less cinematic storytelling than cinematic atmosphere — fashion not as plot, but as sensation.
And yet, the clothes never disappear into the mood. They become extensions of it. Lace slips emerge beneath tailored black coats like secrets revealed too late. Fur-trimmed outerwear and liquid metallic trenches shimmer against shadowed interiors, while handbags — strategically foregrounded throughout — move through the frame not as product placement but as talismans of desire. The recurring tension between masculine severity and feminine fragility feels particularly resonant, echoing the duality long embedded in the House of Fendi itself.
What works especially well is the campaign’s commitment to withholding. In an era where luxury often feels obligated to explain itself — over-captioned, over-narrated, over-performed — Oltre lo Specchio trusts ambiguity. Chiuri and Rosano resist obvious emotional cues, allowing architecture to do much of the storytelling. The rationalist setting becomes a silent co-star: imposing yet strangely intimate, severe but softened by the shifting choreography of light. Mirrors multiply the figures until they seem less like people and more like memories drifting through space.
The nod to Lagerfeld’s Histoire d’Eau also lands with surprising sophistication. Rather than leaning into archival nostalgia, the campaign feels more like a séance — a respectful invocation of House history refracted through a contemporary lens. One senses the spirit of Karl in the references, but never the burden of imitation. That balance is difficult to achieve and, here, remarkably assured.
If there is one point of tension, it is perhaps that the film’s hypnotic restraint occasionally borders on emotional distance. At moments, one longs for a crack in the mirror — a gesture of vulnerability or revelation to puncture the dream. But perhaps that lingering incompleteness is precisely the intention. Like a shadow disappearing around the corner of an empty Roman corridor, Fendi Cruise 2027 understands that mystery often leaves the deepest impression. After all, some fairytales are best told in whispers.
Fendi Chief Creative Officer | Maria Grazia Chiuri
Creative and Image Director | Rachele Regini
Film Director | Davide Rosano
Editor | Davide Rosano
Production | MAI Production
Executive Producer | Neela Quagliola
Producer | Sara Fraticelli
Production Coordinator | Matilde Riggi
Music Composers | Btween
Stylist | Yann Steiner
Hair | Patti Bussa
Makeup | Laura Stucchi, Katja Wilhelmus
Nail Artist | Silvia Magliocco
Set Designer | Edoardo Salomoni