Italian pop legend takes the lead in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Fendi collection

Milan show full of diaphanous dresses and visible bras celebrates ‘incredible feminist’ of the 1970s, Raffaella Carrà

Maria Grazia Chiuri has been having more fun with clothes since she decamped from Paris back to her native Rome to work at Fendi. “I have less of a uniform these days. I think it is because being back here makes me feel young again. I’m not sure my daughter appreciates [this attitude]! But I don’t care,” she said at a preview before her Milan fashion week show.

Not that Chiuri doesn’t approach her work as a designer seriously. She described her second ready-to-wear season at Fendi not as a show, or a collection, but as “the second part of the project I am working on for them”.

She is continuing the protocol she developed as the designer of Dior of using each event as a platform to celebrate women’s creativity. But instead of a ceramicist or a philosopher, her muse for this season is the Italian pop legend Raffaella Carrà.

Carrà, once described as a “one-woman Abba”, had a Lady Gaga bob and a taste for sequined catsuits. She caused a sensation with her raunchy outfits – the first bare midriff ever seen on Italian TV, in 1970 – and her sex-positive lyrics (her song A Far L’Amore Comincia Tu translates as “Take the lead when making love”).