Today’s news of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s return to fashion has, predictably, sparked some snark. Despite—or maybe because of?—the designer’s record as a heart-on-sleeve feminist and the most commercially successful woman fashion designer of the last decade, the prospect of her return to Fendi nearly six months after departing Dior is prompting as many eye rolls online as drum rolls.

I reckon that the eye rollers will be pivoting pretty soon. This Fendi placement is far from arbitrary. Before she arrived at Dior to almost quadruple sales over six years, and before she rose to her first creative directorship position alongside Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino, Chiuri learned her trade at Fendi. There is arguably no living fashion designer without Fendi in her name as deeply connected to t

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