During the Milano Fashion Week 2021 we have encountered a widespread focus on emerging talents as well as sustainable fashion.
Many projects launched by different institutions aimed to give support and visibility to young designers and small brands, especially to the ones that combined low impact, zero waste and sustainability with new, bold and innovative styles, maintaining the high standards characteristic of Italian fashion and design.
We visited different exhibitions and events presented throughout the week in Milan and we discovered many new interesting projects and valuable individuals.
FASHION BRIDGES
Fashion Bridges is a project created by Camera Nazionale della Moda together with the Italian Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, and Polimoda, the famous fashion school in Florence.
It aims to support young and emerging talents and its main values are inclusion and diversity in fashion.
The project connects the heritage of two different and very far countries through fashion, unifying the typical Italian Know-How and style with the colourful prints and beautiful African textiles.
Four former students of Polimoda worked in a pair with four young designers of the South African Fashion Week and presented at the Fashion Hub their capsule collections as the result of the work done during the previous months.
We were particularly impressed by the work of the young designers duos
Domenico Orefice & Michael Peter Reid
They unified the geometric and constructed volumes typical of Made in Italy tailoring with the oversized and relaxed shapes of streetwear, with raw edges and unfinished trims.
The mix is well balanced and enriched by the African prints and ethnical fabrics.
Ilaria Bellomo & Fikile Zamagcino Sokhulu
The two young designers mixed their ideas and skills to create a capsule collection that embodies both their believes. They worked with natural textiles and up-cycled garments to maintain their values of low impact and zero waste.
Their collection is bold and contemporary with a vintage twist. They used dark colours, like black and burgundy, balanced out with a clever use of white fabrics.
They have been appointed as the most creative duo. They interpreted this journey and collaboration as a pregnancy, a path to have a child together. That is why you can see soft and rounds shapes in their garments.
Thanks to their creativity and skills, they were able to perfectly mix the elegance and hyperbolic volumes typical of avant-garde couture with the bold and coloured prints that reminds us of Africa.
The young designers played with layers and stratification that they both use in their own collections.
They combined natural textiles and played with different techniques, like pleating, overlapping, prints, asymmetry and fabrics manipulation, to give shapes and volumes.
BLACK LIVES MATTER IN ITALIAN FASHION
For the “Black Lives Matter in Italian Fashion” project, another collaboration between the Camera Nazionale della Moda and BLACK LIVES MATTER IN ITALIAN FASHION-COLLECTIVE, 5 new fashion talents, specifically Black Indigenous People of Color: Judith, Sheetal, Nyny, Romy and Zineb, had the opportunity to present their collections in a digital fashion show and in the spaces of the Fashion Hub Market.
All of their collections bring different aspects of the African fashion heritage, and they represent a perfectly balanced mix between their African and Italian cultures combined with skilful know-how, new techniques and technologies.
DESIGNERS FOR THE PLANET
Sustainability is one of the pillar of Camera Nazionale della Moda’s values. They started advocating sustainability as a basic value of the Italian fashion industry in 2010.
The Fashion Hub 2021 has hosted three emerging brand focused on eco friendly Made in Italy and dedicated to a conscious craftsmanship.
GILBERTO CALZOLARI
The spring summer 2022 collection by Gilberto Calzolari is an explosive mix of pure energy, vibes and colours, while it remains always faithful to his idea of a chic and elegant woman.
Gilberto’s collection is inspired by his childhood memories mixed with the iconic imaginary of the French Riviera in the ‘60s: a fresh and naive collection, at the same time sensual and sophisticated, but with a contemporary and urban touch.
RE-GENERATION
Re-generations is a collective work of art that embodies an actual representation of sustainability in fashion.
The main goal of this project is to create and spread awareness and a sense of participation for a better future in harmony with the environment.
It was born during the first Italian lockdown, in spring 2020, following the choice of the brand Cancellato not to create new collections in such a situation of emergency and global suffering.
Diletta Cancellato, designer and founder of the brand, decided instead to take a position as a creative in the international debate on sustainability, through an artistic project, curated with the collaboration of the architect Caterina Fumagalli.
Re-generations consists of the alteration on four iconic pieces of the brand’s archive. They were symbolically covered with knitted vegetation made by people, with no limits of age and coming from across the globe, who took part in the initiative.
Each leaf, flower or fruit represents a concrete signature and a confirmation of the values they shared, empowered by the time spent in the craftsmanship of every single piece.
TIZIANO GUARDINI
The eco-designer Tiziano Guardini believes that fashion is an opportunity to celebrate the harmony of life.
Thanks to the Nature, we can re-write the entire process of creation, integration and rediscovery of clothing.
The exclusive designs and prints conceived by the artist Luigi Ciuffreda, make the experience real and immediately perceptible. The garments become the key to let the transformation begin.
The Italian sustainable designer collaborates with the Colombo Group to create fabrics by recovering archival threads. Thanks to this cooperation, fabrics become witnesses of a new know-how, attentive to resources and the desire to produce responsibly, considering every gift of nature as precious.
Fashion has always contributed to social identity. Each of the choices that the collection proposes, from the very first works, contributes to the desire for a free identity in relation to the radical changes in society: never in flight, but constantly in dialogue with the origin.
This collection becomes a garden of infinite shades of colours and prints. The lines mix, the masculine and the feminine lose their archetypal definition.
VALENTINA POLTRONIERI
For her SS 2022 Valentina Poltronieri embarks on a journey to find the time we lost, through the narration of an imaginary and unprecedented space that virtually takes place where you are surrounded by suggestions, colours and scents: Marrakesh.
This journey involves imagination, senses and emotions and it all comes together in the colours, shapes and styles that characterise the entire collection.
Each garment reflects the vitality of Marrakesh, evoking its scents and colours: the palette is in fact composed by the hues of the typical Moroccan carpets, fabrics, spices, food and landscapes.
In the production of this fashion collection, the emerging designer has paid close attention to the use of textiles and patterns, keeping an eye on sustainability opting for natural materials such as organic cotton and linen.
The fabrics are light and soft carefully balanced with geometric cuts to get a sense of dynamism and versatility.
FASHIONABLE PROJECT
La Rinascente Duomo during the Milan Fashion Week has hosted the exhibition of 5 young emerging talents.
The project called “Milano Fashionable Project” turned out to be a lively and dynamic place that changed its layout every day to host five different presentations of the chosen Italian brands.
Every day, one of the 5 brands was the protagonist of the space. In addition of presenting its Spring/Summer 2022 collections, the young emerging fashion designers had the opportunity to collect orders from buyers and people who visited the famous multi-brand boutique.
Amotea by Diletta Amodei, Des Phemmes, Federico Cina (womenswear collection), Froy (gender fluid collection) and Traffico (Shoes) were the selected brands for this year.
Article by Federica Macheda
