Borders: A flash of New Italian Fashion: The Italian Style on Display in NYC

The Consulate General of Italy and the Italian Trade Commission in New York (ICE), in partnership with the Italian Embassy in Washington DC, have launched an unprecedented initiative aimed to put Italian fashion on display in New York. This project is part of a host of events planned by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Economic Development in order to enhance Italy’s visibility abroad. It is the brainchild of Italy’s National Chamber of Fashion headquartered in Milan.

By taking a contemporary perspective that integrates multiple disciplines of art, this initiative aims to showcase Italy’s excellencies in the fields of sustainable and youth fashion. Indeed, Italy’s fashion will be, for the first time, portrayed through an exhibition where fashion merges with music and contemporary art. The exhibit takes place at the heart of Manhattan, at the High Line, which has become a symbol of industrial reuse and environmental sustainability. The exhibit will take place all day on May 17, and will be open to visitors of the park. Thanks to this event, the creativity of young designers and artists coming from a circle of Italian contemporary creatives will be put at the center of New York’s cultural scene in an unprecedented way, as it is open to the general public for the very first time.

“Borders: A Flash Of New Italian Fashion” rolls out a program of events promoted by CNMI Camera Club, a project aimed at promoting the more contemporary face of Italy’s fashion, and devised to strengthen its inter-linkages with other expressive means including art, design, music, and new technologies. New brands, new professions, and new market trends come to the forefront.

The exhibition is hosted with support from the General Consulate of Italy in New York, ICE, and the Italian Culture Institute of New York.

Curated by Giangi Giordano, this New York-based exhibition, which will also be reprised during Men’s Fashion Week in Milan in June 2019, is a snapshot of the latest wave of Italian fashion design. Taking place for one day at New York City’s High Line, an important destination for public art, this essential, instantaneous installation of video projections, tubes, neon, LED and iconic looks will showcase the work of four brands that have grown in the last few years. They represent the avant-garde, an evolution of the movement that put Italy back at the center of the international fashion scene. The brands include M1992, Magliano, United Standard and Vitelli Maglieria Italiana, all of which contribute to the aesthetics and vitality of emerging urban cultures, with typically Italian stylization and production know- how. New technologies, music, the visual arts and project- and communication-driven culture form the core of their mission and their work, with an aesthetic rooted in a combination of hedonism and antagonism that has characterized youth cultures in Italy since the 1970s.

The exhibition features a new video shot in Apulia with local youths by Francesco Petroni, one of the directors most in demand on the international scene, and videos and images produced over the years by the brands themselves, as well as the showing of key garments on biodegradable mannequins by Bonaveri, a world-leading mannequin manufacturer. The exhibition is rounded out by performances of music and the audio accompaniment in the display spaces by designers Giorgio Di Salvo (United Standard), Mauro Simionato (Vitelli Maglieria Italiana) and Dorian Stefano Tarantini (M1992), all of whom are already active as DJs and producers.

“Borders focuses on four emerging brands created by digital natives who subvert all the hierarchies and put past, present and glimpses of the future in a new perspective, yet with forms and care over detail that are extremely precise, very Italian. They’re designers for whom images, communication, graphics and music are integral to the thinking of their brands and the production of their garments. Camera Club is the start of a new experimental project by CNMI dedicated to contemporary Italian fashion and new brands and their relationships with other forms of creativity. It’s designed to strengthen one of the pillars of our work: monitoring and supporting what’s new and most experimental in our fashion,” says CNMI President Carlo Capasa.

“The expression of singular forms of beauty, as distinguishing features of the day-to-day, are at the centre of the creative processes of the new wave of Italian designers. They’re not looking for the typical aesthetic embellishment or balance commonly associated with ‘Italian taste.’ There’s no nostalgia here. Their approach is vital and rooted in their lives. They filter Italian style through practical concerns and irony, not concepts. Closer to observing reality than to abstractions. Their aesthetic is rooted in young sub-cultures, independent music, places where people gather, clubs and festivals, in the context of contemporary Italy: multicultural, gender-fluid, and with a taste for the aesthetic of the provinces and suburbs. A culture of borders and confines,” explains Giangi Giordano, curator of the exhibition.

The idea of CNMI Camera Club and the exhibition were conceived and developed by CNMI with Boiler, a communications agency based in Milan and Barcelona.

With great pride, Franciacorta is partner of Camera Club, a project dedicated to creativity, innovation and new trends: the ideal context to taste the elegance and style of this inimitable product. Since 2012 the Franciacorta Consortium has started an important partnership with Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, choosing Italian fashion as a similar area with which to share the distinctive features of Made in Italy in the world: craftsmanship, elegance and quality.

A special thanks to DHL Express Italy, partner of the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana for over ten years, with whom we share the common objectives of promoting national excellence, encouraging the circulation of Made in Italy in the world and supporting the process of internationalization of small and medium enterprises. Thanks to DHL, the outfits of the four brands, packaged entirely in Italy, will be shipped from the capital of Italian fashion to the American one.

Special thanks also go to Bonaveri, who supplied the mannequins, in which the aesthetics of form work alongside the ethics underpinning their socially responsible and environmentally sustainable production processes.

Aesthetic refinement, craftsmanship and innovation come together in the lines of Bonaveri mannequins as in made-to-measure collections. In 2016, Bonaveri was the first company in the world to launch a biodegradable mannequin.

THE BRANDS

M1992

The project grew out of collaboration between multimedia art, music and fashion and became increasingly geared toward experimental and stylistic crossovers. The founder, Dorian Stefano Tarantini, advocates an elegantly decadent style that immediately earned him strong international consensus. The brand was launched in 2017.

Magliano

Magliano was founded in 2016 by designer Luca Magliano. It concentrates on wardrobe staples, leveraging a sort of emotive anthropology and with surgically precise cuts and painstaking care over stitching. It gives fashion magic in realism and a typically Italian taste.

United Standard

This brand started up in Milan at the beginning of 2015, an initiative of art director Giorgio Di Salvo. It’s the new answer to the contemporary cultural offering as interface between two distinct values: aesthetics and functionality. A line of streetwear focusing equally on accessories and clothing.

Vitelli Maglieria Italiana

Mauro Simionato, creative director at Vitelli, launched an Italian knitwear brand inspired by youth culture and current Italian style. The first Vitelli collections were stylistically inspired by “Cosmic” (1980-1984), a pacifist and anti-ideological movement, all-Italian, that emerged at the end of the “years of lead” with the motto Music is culture.

THE CURATOR

Giangi Giordano

Born in 1991, Giordano graduated from Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan and started working with important stylists while developing his aesthetically oriented skills. In 2013 he embarked on an intense collaboration (as Visual Researcher) with film director Luca Guadagnino, initially working on the iconography of his fashion films and then focusing on cinema, on films like A Bigger Splash (2015), Call Me by Your Name (2017) and Suspiria (2018). In 2016 he founded Virgo, an independent collective intent on forging a new creative milieu for women and which rapidly established itself in Milan’s underground scene. He has taught at Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan since 2017. Borders is his first exhibition.