The Spazio Ricerca area at Pitti Filati – on the Lower Level of the Main Pavilion together with Fashion at Work – is the center of gravity of the fair and everything related to creativity in yarns. An avant-garde experimental and trend lab, the Spazio Ricerca is complemented by and complements the area devoted to the most advanced services and technologies for the textile/clothing industry, offering a single – and unique – itinerary where research, products and technology engage in ongoing dialogue.

Senso is the title-theme of this edition: staged by fashion designer Angelo Figus and knitwear expert Nicola Miller in settings designed by architect Alessandro Moradei, the Spazio Ricerca will present the trends for spring-summer 2012.

SENSO is a journey through the senses and their potential revealing the ideas and concepts around us that are just waiting to be understood in a new way. Like short films, 25 new stimuli related to our senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell will transpose bits of our collective and daily experiences into something new and unique.

The “sensory” itinerary

In a time of uncertainty and sudden, radical and constant changes, heightening and stimulating the senses expresses a desire for dreams and for concreteness. Our senses and sensations, become tools for research and means of expression: they bring us an understanding of things and ideas and help us transform them.

The new ideas come from reality, but they are abstracted through a process of synthesis in which the components are crushed to become the ingredients in a recipe for the creation of a color, a sensation, a structure or a shape.

And so, as in some of the most important contemporary experiments in the worlds of art, music, cuisine and the fragrance industry, the senses will be used to break through the wall of subjective, cultural and sociological conventions separating the ugly from the beautiful, the pleasant and unpleasant, and the good and the bad. The way has been paved to reeducate our senses to new application scenarios where places will be described through their smells, consistencies through their sounds, flavors through their colors and shapes through their noises.

Spring-summer 2012 will celebrate the senses through 25 new stimuli linked to sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell which, like short films, translate the elements of collective experience and daily life into something exciting and extraordinary. Twenty-five situations that become colors, atmospheres and structures will be divided into five themes – one for each sense – that develop around five very distinct situations/scenarios. Each situation/scenario has a title that becomes the name of the color and its texture.

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