10 TFP’s best articles about avant-garde and emerging fashion in 2015

For celebrating the 5th anniversary of The Fashion Propellant I want to propose to my dear readers a collection of the best articles written in these years. We start with…

2015

Emotion. When sometimes my thought goes to the Alexander McQueen‘s exhibition that gave life to the idea of creating a blog, the only thing I can feel is a deep, sincere emotion invading me with many memories of those moments. It’s not easy for me to explain what happened to me when I was surrounded by the dark atmospheres created by the exhibit. Something happened and it was the beginning of everything. “Savage Welcome” (here the link) was the first article, a real welcome to my second life, from fashion designer to fashion blogger and talent scout.

The first year everything was an experiment to me. I’ve never wrote an article before, the ideas were a bit confused, but I knew that the direction was that of not-conventional and avant-garde fashion. But what to write in a fashion blog without having any journalistic knowledges? I decided to sincerely speak of my personal tastes, of everything impressed me because I’m always fascinated by the idea of searching something new.

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Before written in Italian with English translation and then directly in English when I understood the provenince of my international public, I introduced the concept of “New Talents”, looking to all the young or emerging designers with something interesting to say and the attention went to Ying Gao (here the link), a real artist of avant-garde fashion who creates ethereal masterpieces mixing technology and light fabrics, and to Luca Lin (here the link), who launched his collection just in 2015 and who now works with Galib Gassanov (they are both my ex-students at HFFA Academy) in the famous brand Act N°1.

Another topic very interesting to me, deriving from the direct requests of my fashion design students, was that of Design Process, one of the most read part of my blog in which I want to investigate all the most important elements to develop when you want to start with a fashion project. With the intent of creating a real virtual guide for aspiring fashion designers with practical examples, I started speaking about “What is a trend” (here the link) and the analysis of its path from “Streetstyle to runway” (here the link) and then passing to one of my favorite argument, the mood board, seeing firstly why it’s so important in the article “5 reasons to make a mood board” (here the link) and then practically “How to make a mood board” (here the link).

Also trend research is a fundamental part of The Fashion Propellant and of my personal design method, but in the blog I didn’t want simply to make reports from the catwalks or speak about trend forecasting. I wanted to analyze what were the trends coming from the work of artists, avant-garde brands and young designers, to see what they have in common. What I found was extraordinary, because I understood that we can collect feelings, aesthetic movements and concepts into different categories that follow a kind of flow.

Here how I launched the series of articles called “Leitmotiv“, updated with the last trends recently seen, starting in 2015 from “We are all made of stars” (here the link), in which I present the work of artists like Yayoi Kusama and fashion photographer like Tim Walker, updated with new talents like Bartolotta & Martorana, Leila Azhdarpoor from Istituto Burgo and Salvatore Pecora from Harim Accademia Euromediterranea

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“Welcome to Pastelworld” (here the link) was the second leitmotiv in which, alternating pictures with a pair of my fashion illustrations, I collected all the images from D Magazine and Lab Magazine and from a collection made by Andrea Zanatelli, another of my ex students at HFFA Academy, updated with some outfit by Vingi Wong and Federica Tedeschi, both designers from Central Saint Martins, having in common the use of a particularly delicate colore palette, almost at the limit of the candy’s sweetness.

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Another important trend was that of the human body used as source of inspiration for creating extraordinary and cutting-edge garments and pieces of art. “The body outside: blood & heart” (here the link) explores the anatomy of the venous system that create incredible patterns on the creations by Jean Paul Gaultier and Yiqing Yin but also, in the latest updates of the article, of the young designers Anastasia del Vecchio from Accademia Koefia and Mara Gualina, from IED, who were both fascinated by the realistic shape of the heart.

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