Arthur Arbesser , SPRING-SUMMER 2024, MFW
Nothing beats the joy of being able to express yourself freely. That precious mindset of not caring about what others think. Instead, purely enjoying yourself while doing what you love, caring more about a creative exchange with others while getting your hands dirty.
In a city where you are surrounded by such preciousness, represented either by sleek clothes embodying a butter-and-sage good taste, or by aggressive contrasts of hyper-short skirts and deep cleavages, we wanted to take a different stance and further carve out our naive, personal, slightly odd fashion corner, leaving lots of space to spontaneity.
A trip to our friends of Spazio Meta set the tone - a vast warehouse in Milan, filled with used pieces of window displays and sets of past fashion shows. Seeing a red plint or a curved piece of wood got the brain going - the immediate pleasure of a weird shape or a bright, colorful technical surface.
We started to mix those impressions with huge oil paintings, done in our studio. Later on, floral sketches made with thick brushes joined in.
The whole team also went through the camera rolls on their phones selecting favourite images of surfaces and textures and combining them with a few mistakingly overexposed analog photos.
A big piece of white cardboard got treated with liters of coloured aquarelle paint over the course of days, creating a lovely materic texture, evolving again and again every time a new layer of wet paint was poured over the dried ones. This time, our passion for stripes came through spraying paint over a tape that later got removed, leaving a clean white line.
Most importantly all these crafty excercises ended up being perfectly printed on sleek cotton popeline and flowy viscose crepe, and miracolously turned into sophisticated, chic patterns.
In this small, focused collection a colourful and energetic feeling meets with a childlike pureness, mixing naive prints and fabric experimentations with romantic rashes, shiny pailettes and minimal utility gear. Straightforward, easy-to-wear summer dresses and shirts and skirts with various cuts and volumes, some full and airy some more flirty, are made of bright silk, printed cotton popeline, cotton broderie anglaise lace and shiny viscose jersey. And - by now a usual habit - some fabrics of the collection are our leftover stock fabrics, this time over-died and manipulated.
An ode to the importance of dreaming like a child as long as possible, trying to keep playing and not becoming too serious, of giving new meaning to old stuff and turning less precious things into beautiful ones.
The collection was photographed by ICTM and Francesco Saverio Costanzo at Spazio Meta, in dialogue with the space and the elements on site.
Spazio META is a start-up operating in the field of temporary installations and set-up within the art, fashion and design world. With the aim of offering an innovative and virtuous example of recovery of spent materials, Spazio META wants to respond to a concrete need: counteract the overproduction of waste by focusing on the potential of existing resources.
