In ‘The Art of Balance’, Maria Grazia Chiuri takes the Very Colibrì onto the athletics track, exploring a FENDI signature through movement and balance.
Balance becomes both gesture and subject in FENDI‘s latest campaign, where Maria Grazia Chiuri revisits the ‘Very Colibrì’ through images by photographer Michal Pudelka. Set at the Stadio delle Terme di Caracalla in Rome, ‘The Art of Balance’ places a high heel inside a visual language usually reserved for sport.
The original Colibrì appeared in FENDI’s Spring Summer 2018 collection, recognizable for the elastic straps wrapping around the foot and its unusually light construction. Chiuri’s new version pares the silhouette back further. A deeper V shaped vamp elongates the foot, while a slender heel and fine straps emphasize its delicacy. A padded cushion and a small trekking inspired hook introduce an unexpected technical element.
That friction is what makes the campaign interesting. Pudelka photographs the models stretching, balancing and moving through a monumental Roman setting, shifting attention from how the shoe looks while standing still to what a body can do while wearing it. The heel becomes less a pedestal than an object in negotiation with the body.
Movement was already embedded in Chiuri’s first Fall Winter 2026/27 collection for FENDI, presented under the phrase ‘Meno io, più noi’. Returning to the house where she began her career in accessories in 1989, she has spoken about functionality, femininity and sensuality as central elements of its vocabulary.
The Very Colibrì brings those ideas down to the scale of a single shoe. Rather than reinventing a FENDI code from scratch, Chiuri adjusts its proportions and changes the body imagined inside it.
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