The second edition for the new Spazio Ricerca project, which - with concept and staging by designer Angelo Figus and knitwear expert Nicola Miller - abolishes the frontiers with Fashion at Work, the area devoted to the most advanced service and technology companies operating in the textile-clothing industry.

The result is a single itinerary where research, product, and technology are constantly interacting, a laboratory for experimenting with avant-garde movements and trends, a 360° inspiration for fashion’s top creative talents. Located inside the Cavaniglia Pavilion, at the entrance to the fair, with a new exhibition layout curated by architect Alessandro Moradei, Spazio Ricerca confirms its standing as a unique international-level experiment in trends research at the service of fashion.

WHO AND I

is the title of this edition, which is staging trends for fall/winter 2010-2011. Spazio Ricerca reflects on its own identity and the identity of the spectator with an enquiry that works backward toward its origins, its original matrix, its identifying characteristics as starting points for the future: the future of its history, the future of its aesthetic. 

FIVE THEMES generate the same number of itineraries: PRE-HE-STORY, RE-TAILOR, CHIL-DISH, AND-ROGINE, U-NISEX.

Who and I uses video projections, swatches, knit stitches, and finished garments created ad hoc for the space to point up the multiple creative interactions between knitwear and the various product types that compose a fashion collection. Graphic signs and writing will provide the background and cornice for the five installations in the trends area.

The WHO AND I project is made possible thanks to the valuable technical contribution of PANTONE and CRYSTALLIZED™ - Swarovski Elements

PRE-HE-STORY

speaks to a future pluperfect in which the ice age is a metaphor of our daily world.

Fifteen stylized prehistoric sculptures of a man and a woman, coarse and angular, of Cubist inspiration, are the supports for knits in earth colors with stitches that recall the structures of fur, ice, and rock. The colors are the naturals of hides and skins, stone and wood, in contrast with optical white and glass. A visionary shooting in the “O” of the title presents knit garments created for the occasion to provide a clear reading - almost a technical rendering - of the theme.  

RE-TAILOR

redefines customs and usage in tailoring. All the elements of the art of fine tailoring as portrayed in historic paintings are superimposed on the more recent sartorial tradition of our century. The visitor is greeted by about thirty busts aligned as though in a gallery and draped with swatches illustrating treatments, processes and stitches. The stereotypical classical Roman busts of patricians and ladies are black, the negative of marble, to lend an abstract, punk connotation. The colors of the swatches are classic but pictorial, citing velvets, the regal atmospheres of Imperial interiors, and sublime garments.

CHIL-DISH

is a dreamlike moment, a visionary regression to childhood that expresses our need for a return to lost beauty and serenity. Huge boxes, in translucent material and evanescent colors that preserve lively memories of the past, are containers for gigantic rag-dolls. The dolls’ clothing and accessories show off knit stitches and treatments that suggest new concepts of proportion, inspired by the differences between the child’s and the adult’s world. Wood lacquers and porcelain glazes give wool a look that is new and antique at the same time.

AND-ROGINE

interprets fusion, confusion, and evolution of the XY genes, a future projection of mutating human physiognomy in which men’s and women’s features will almost coincide. Sixteen sculptures, portraying ascetic figures that express a new concept of sexuality, wear the outfits of  an androgynous collection created ad hoc to illustrate the theme inputs. The sculptures stand around a large circle surrounding the video projections at its center. The colors are amorphous, reminiscent of the skin tones of the peoples of the world.

U-NISEX

is the annihilation of the shape. Shape becomes simplified,  unisex and makes room for materials and stitches to become the salient features of the clothing itself. Celebration of the jumpsuit and the T-shape inspires the 30 abstract, white neon crosses, the main movers of an installation that recalls contemporary art very closely. Each cross “wears” a caftan on which textures and details mix and confound the masculine and the feminine. A theme of passepartout colors, taken from the world of work and applied to a sophisticated concept for comfortable, egalitarian indoor-dressing.