Polimoda's project to re imagine the fashion system

Florence has always been, together with Milan and Rome, one of the main capitals of Italian fashion. And this September, thanks to the return of Pitti Immagine and the great Dolce & Gabbana Alta Sartoria show, the vitality of Florentine fashion has found new momentum. On this very occasion, the Polimoda in Florence presented on 2 September its new project, (P)REVIEW – Looking Differently, inside the nineteenth-century Villa Favard. 

The goal of the evening installation-performance curated by Linda Loppa and Massimiliano Giornetti was to give voice to their students by encouraging them to provide a new interpretation of the future of fashion after months of distance and closure – using the creative medium of fashion design as a method of observation and expression of contemporary reality. These were the words with which the director of Polimoda, Danilo Venturi, commented on the initiative:

«It's time to think about the restart - of the city, of fashion, of the school - but to do so we must be able to change, evolve, redefine the parameters of aesthetics and representation. It is the young people who can point us the way, we must know how to listen to them and give space to their creative interpretation».

The exhibition begins inside the evocative garden on the banks of the Arno of the villa, then crosses the doors of Villa Favard and winds through the succession of the interior halls, through a cadenced rhythm of bright spaces and dark spaces whose suggestion moves on the strings of all five senses also thanks to the olfactory ambience created by Olfattorio. The areas of the historic villa are dotted with the hand-crafted tailoring creations of 20 students at the end of their studies in Fashion Design, who have done their work under the mentoring of Massimiliano Giornetti himself - new director of the design department of the institute since July last year. 

Throughout the entire itinerary, visitors are invited to look at the garments worn by models and mannequins now up close, now from afar, correcting and updating their perception and perspective – thus awakening within themselves the emotional-aesthetic relationship that binds it to fashion as a creative expression. Here emerges the meaning of the Looking Differently of the name of the exhibition – observing reality in a different way and through the lens of a new generation of designers represented for the occasion by Thomas McGovern, Robert Fioschi, Serena Schettino, Francesca Zangrillo, Ilaria Bellomo, Polina Popova, Ji Zhi, Yi Ding, Alice Baggio, Gianluca Padula, Francesca Monaci, Emma Gini, Yixuan Zhang, Lucia Garofalo, Karel Mirella, Martinez Flor, Nicolas Bollinger, Diana Patricia Oscos Rueda, Zhanna Diakonenko, Giulia Riccoboni, Silvia Anderson, Lorenzo Moretti e Sanjana Pessina.