Mid-vacation roughly a month ago, we lost the great stylist-philosopher Issey Miyake. A dear friend of Flavio Lucchini and Gisella Borioli, founders of the Superstudio Group, with whom he’d enjoyed a great adventure in fashion and in art since the 1970s. We share the memories of Flavio Lucchini with passages from his autobiography DESTINO, 90 chapters (IL DESTINO, 90) which recount the story of contemporary fashion and of its protagonists, from a very particular, intimate and behind the scenes point of view.
The beautiful book NON SOLO KIMONO. HOW JAPAN HAS REVOLVED ITALIAN FASHION by Laura Dimitrio, published by Skira, recounts the interesting four-century-long story of Japanese influence entering into the costume of Italy, starting with the kimono and ending with the new-pop launched by manga. The presentation will take place on April 12th in the atelier of the fashion-art museum FlavioLucchiniArt where the author, Laura Dimitrio, will meet Gisella Borioli who, as a journalist, was the first to support the Japanese "nouvelle Vague" in the 1980s with her cult magazine DONNA...
"My interest in Japanese influences on the Italian fashion began several years ago, during my MA History of Art Dissertation. I chose to study the sketches designed by the Milanese painter Giuseppe Palanti for the costumes of the first performance of Madama Butterfly, which debuted at La Scala in Milan in 1904...
The upcoming Milan Fashion Week will bring in the grand space of Superstudio Maxi two contemporary fashion shows that we are expecting to be very different but both highly spectacular. The first will be the returning to the official calendar for a historic and always innovative brand like DIESEL. It is instead going to be a debut on the Milan catwalks for the young Japanese brand AMBUSH®️...
MAXI will turn into an exceptional catwalk for the two protagonists of the next Milan Fashion Week Women's Collection F/W 2022/2023, scheduled from February 22nd to 28th...
2002/2022. Twenty years of the White Show, from a small corner in the Fair in 2001 to the most influential and international independent contemporary fashion show that has reached the goal of more than 500 quality exhibitors. Each time an event not to be missed for the high rate of creativity and that has been able to expand exponentially keeping an eye on the "signs of the time". Let's go over, together with Massimiliano Bizzi, its brilliant inventor, this adventure that took off from Superstudio...
1. How did White become White?
White was born almost by chance, but it is no coincidence that it has become the most important reference show for womenswear in Europe...
Playful, jaunty, full of life, colourful. Those are the shoes that Carla Foca, born in Messina but Milanese by choice, has been creating since 2010. A Sicilian feeling stems from the exuberant palette: the blue of the sea, the yellow of the lemons, the red inside of the watermelons. From the first clay maquettes to the unique and fanciful objects in which art meets fashion (and viceversa), Carla Foca’s production is refined and uses the highest quality leather...
Carla Foca observes nature’s richness with simplicity: «the flora, the fauna inspire me endlessly...
Manila Grace presented the new "Musa" spring/summer 2022 collection by Gaetano Navarra. After the show, there was a dinner accompanied by music played by a DJ and many guests...
In via Tortona 27 a two-day event of the fashion brand Manila Grace took place. On November 25, for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, Manila Grace presented its "Muse", the Spring/Summer 2022 collection, in the spaces of Superstudio Più: the name "Muse" recalls both the daughters of Zeus which were traditionally considered the patrons of the art and a specific Chinese plant variety the fibres of which are employed to produce the brand clothes.
Independence, freedom, self-empowerment are the words chosen to represent Manila Grace's idea of the values that contemporary women...
On November 21, at Superstudio the new Kickit edition is back in town. A fair-market presents the latest trends in streetwear clothing, enriched by an intense agenda of workshops, conferences and cultural events...
It’s not about sneakers only. Since 2017, Kickit brings together streetwear enthusiasts and collectors, proposing itself as a reference market for the latest about street clothing. This year, the theme is sustainability. The famous motto "nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed" today has been...
It’s been a few years now that this engaging initiative - born in 2017 from an idea of the journalist Cinzia Sasso, wife of the former Mayor of Milan Giuliano Pisapia - invites fashion creators to open their magical ateliers to visitors, bringing them closer to this endearing profession. A surefire winne that spreads throughout Italy, involving fine craftsmanship and excellent productions. The 2021 edition also adds art, which definitely belongs to Superstudio Più. On Saturday 23 and Sunday 24, the new FlavioLucchiniArt Museum will open its atelier and archives, revealing the secrets and wonders of Flavio Lucchini as both an artist and an entrepreneur, who chose beauty and fashion as the common thread of his life choices. Tickets for visitors were soon snapped up...
On 24 and 25 October, ApritiModa will be back as the opportunity (born four years ago) to...
Is there another way to think about a collection, a fashion show? Yes, if the brand is led by the pair of young and open-minded creatives Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina, with an idea of 360 ° creativity that follows the fluid rules of today's society.
With the courageous choice to inaugurate the immense peripheral industrial space of Superstudio Maxi at the fashion shows, with the idea of overturning the rules by putting the catwalk indoors, inside a mysterious tunnel and leaving out, in sight but in the dark, backstage and technical services, with the challenge of keeping the public standing and putting them on the catwalk in a long line in front of the models, the Sunnei spring/summer 2021 collection has staged its conception of...
The new edition of White Show opens tomorrow. A full return to the usual mission of international research looking to the future.
The renewed format, a crossover of art, design, culture and technology, where the new venues of fashion are explored and special installations are created, sees White’s founder Massimiliano Bizzi working together with Beppe Angiolini, founder of Sugar concept store, who says “The paradigm of post-pandemic stores is destined to change and evolve. A wish for newness has strongly emerged, retailers need to go back to research activities and find stronger and stronger identities carrying their own style. White represents the reference platform for research and SMEs, as well as an important showcase where Made in Italy is supported...
Veronica Magni, a 29-year-old girl, wrote to us and aroused our interest. During the pandemic, she created a collection of bags, all unique and different from each other, focusing on diversity and tradition as core values.
“This was my favorite game ”. Veronica uses these words to remember the entire days spent with her grandmother to create bags with bolts of fabric. A game that one day became a mature project and today is a real profession that gives her the chance to create fashion bags with a vintage touch, thanks to the particular choice of thick fabrics, colors and leather. Costumers themselves are involved in the creative process of always unique and different pieces “just like any woman with her own unique personality”. Following this logic, Veronica’s project is detached from fast-production, entering the narrow and aware circle of small craftsmen. Recently she inaugurated her brand, Magni Collection, officially becoming a free and brave professional.
Daring combinations of extraordinary charm have paraded at the fashion show of Istituto Secoli on Thursday, July 8 at 5.30pm. The Academy made visible the collections of 27 designers at the end of their career on the official website (www.secoli.com) in live streaming. Among its students there are three in particular who, having been identified as the best ones in the school, opened the parade, set in the large daylight of Superstudio, with real experiments on fabrics.
Among the different spaces of our structure, Istituto Secoli decided to set its “fashion tale” in the daylight that with its neutrality lent itself well to the presentation of the different collections made by the young emerging talents who brought the realization of their dreams right here on the catwalk at the end of a three-year course of study. Behind the realization of the garments there is the study of the digital and virtual world through the different arts that generates, as it is suggested by the name of the inspiration concept “GE.NE.RA”...
In order to keep itself solid over time, a brand must rediscover, reinvent, but above all it must be able to tell about itself. C.P. Company, our tenant for three years, has always managed to do and still keeps doing so. We knocked on the door of this new neighbor, driven by the curiosity to know him…because it is also thanks to these protagonists that Superstudio Più keeps breathing.
There are many realities concentrated here in the district of Tortona. Among these, there are some that have chosen to grow or develop further at Superstudio Più. A big space that Lorenzo Osti - the founder’s son of C.P. Company and the current president of the famous sportswear brand - defines as “a container whose beauty consists in its neutrality”...
Fashion can be passion, inspiration, art. This is how Flavio Lucchini, who has long been a fashion protagonist, celebrates it with an amazing sculpture.
Flavio Lucchini, as well as an architect, publisher, enlightened entrepreneur, is a refined and visionary artist. His great sculptures draw on his editorial background in the fashion world as creator of the most important magazines and they have become the evident symbol characterizing the three important creative hubs he founded in Milan, Superstudio 13, Superstudio Più, and, the last one, Superstudio Maxi.
DIVINE, an incredible golden evening dress, shines in all its gigantic size (9 meters) in front of the entrance of Superstudio Maxi and lights up Via Moncucco...
Wearable Art, the creative power of Fashion and Art come together to rethink artwork’s concept on its own, a phenomenon able to give life to indomitable works living and evolving with those who exhibits-wears them. Just like the recently announced collaboration between the internationally well-known writer Flycat and the street Broke Clothing brand.
It was the last art exhibition at Superstudio just before pandemic's great shock. Among the first writing philosophy's artists in Italy, Flycat celebrated his 50th birthday and 36-year career in MyOwnGallery with a significant solo exhibition. Kisses, greetings, hugs, toast… A crowded vernissage with more than 500 guests just in one evening.
And then everything closed, exhibitions, galleries, theaters, the previous life becomes a distant and faded memory...
Fashion winds discreetly among design avenues. Considered by some to be a minus, by others a plus. Totally ignoring judgment, fashion with its trends joins living choices, surfaces colors, coverings textures, interventions on shapes.
Fashion and design face market developments and changes together, adapting to the new needs that 2020 has highlighted even more. That's how Fashion responds.
TECHNOLOGICAL FASHION
Technology acceleration is ready to influence, distorting it, the next millennium also with regard to fashion. Fabrics will play a leading role...
After Sanremo Festival and online Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks, among social and mass media, eyes are full of spectacular fashion contaminated with stage and virtual catwalks. What's clear is that pandemic has no set limits to imagination.
Sexual fluidity, mutants of all kinds, returns to the future, tributes to the past, mixologies, spectacular nudity, theatrical costumes or chaste white tailor-suits for women but tuxedos with jet for men, minimalism and excess: the fashion lexicon of the latest Italian digital-fashion shows is reinterpreted in extreme version on the catwalk of the just ended Sanremo festival. Where there was no shortage of creations with powerful brands.
Starting with Etro's Swarovski crystal-embroidered nude effect jumpsuits for Maneskin, the rock-winners...
Camera della Moda (Chamber of Fashion) had announced the exceptional effort of the entire fashion sector for this February appointment with Milan Fashion Week. And so it was. A busy week, with a number of appearances, including fashion shows and presentations, nothing to envy to "usual" fashion shows, those that lay down the law and business in happy times when the word pandemic was not part of common language. Seven days of elegance and extravagance in response to a single question: what about tomorrow?
So virtual catwalks, walk-in between buildings and monuments, empty theaters, light runways in the dark, visionary sets, country views, comforting apartments, stunning environments, graphic interventions were the virtual frame of fall/winter 2021/22 fashion. With Italian fashion superstars, international brands, reassuring classics, contemporaries, the emergent ones, transgressive, fashion "niches", accessories. All freely combined, one behind another. A free and varied panorama, an open and punctual evidence between new-classic and provocation, between strict-chic and street-mix...
For the first time the White fair, the most important in the international contemporary fashion area, is totally digital. White for 20 years had been held in the halls of Superstudio Più and from there occupied the entire via Tortona with other locations, reaching a record number of 500 international brands. For White too, the Covid-19 pandemic, with the impossible proximity of people and prohibited or limited travel, meant a change of strategy. The new digital format includes 200 companies and numerous initiatives to support SMEs in collaboration with the Municipality of Milan and other institutions.
Many institutions and organizations have joined together to contribute to White's new course, including, in addition to the Municipality of Milan, MAECI, ICE, Confartigianato Imprese, Cittadell’arte-Fondazione Pistoletto, IDEE Brand platform up to the new CSM-Camera Showroom Milano association...
Recent digital experiments to give new life to fashion shows even in the persistence of the pandemic have generated the first entirely virtual Milan Fashion Week. And this is not the only novelty: in general innovation there are interesting grafts that bring fashion closer to the people, to the metissage in progress, to the free inventiveness of creative directors who have taken over the leadership of well-known brands and to new designers who are totally free from the rules of good dressing, flanked by the most consolidated names by lasting successes of Italian fashion.
The National Chamber of Italian Fashion...
A quite full programme, starting from Friday, January 15th, with new and historical names, street-wear and reassuring classics, catwalks on unlikely runways differently set and futuristic locations, multi-ethnic models and dancers and performers. Perhaps some bombastic made in Italy brands are missing, even if we know that by now there's a sort of freedom in times and ways of presenting its own collections. Always one step ahead Prada with comments from fashion school students around the world, live streaming.
In the five-day digital Calendar released by Camera della Moda for January 2021 Men's Collections, there is no shortage of style contrasts. If on the first day Zegna is followed by Lagos, Fendi is preceded by Spyder...
Sustainability and advanced craftsmanship are core themes of WSM digital new edition, the online project by White which presents 40 men's and unisex collections from 16 to 18 January on the occasion of Milan Fashion Week Men's Collection.
The new goal of contemporary craftsmanship - carefully selected for sustainability, refined aesthetics and new production technologies alongside "handmade" - takes advantage of WSM-White platform to present to buyers and press a surprising mix of Italian research brands, man or gender fluid, with the possibility of setting business appointments in real time...
WHITE, the contemporary fashion show at Superstudio, promotes the first Fuorisalone of fashion with the events of Milan Loves Italy in collaboration with Interni magazine during Fashion Week. From September 24 to the 27 there will be the first nine events in Milan fashion multibrands together with independent designers and Italian brands.
The MILANO LOVES ITALY movement continues to grow, including, besides National Chamber of Fashion, CBI-The Best Shops, Best Showroom, also the newly formed Alined association, and NIAM Nazionale Italiana Agenti Moda (Italian National Fashion Agents).
To make Milan more vibrant and dynamic during the fashion week, came the idea of involving fashion multibrands and some design spaces to create a circuit of events and presentations to support Italian companies and producing in Italy. The project will be launched - together with WHITE - on Thursday 24 at 12.00 am in Tortona 27 Superstudio Più. The first nine events involving different stores between fashion and design are already scheduled for the September fashion week, from 23 to 27...
After the experiment of the Digital Fashion Week in July in Milan, with controversial results, here are the first signs launched by the "daring" to bring fashion back to the center with phygital mode (physical and digital) for fashion shows and fairs that have always been our strong point capable of igniting interest, desire, business, relationships, trends. The hottest fashion show ever, White Show in September, at Superstudio Più will be there. With a totally renewed edition full of surprises.
In a moment of great uncertainty, the games are played day by day, trying to precede the times and send signs of optimism to obligatorily take us towards a way out of the long economic lockdown that is straining the fashion system. Massimiliano Bizzi, founder and creative director of White, the research fair that in twenty years of new ideas and successes has become the international focal point of research fashion, with more than 500 exhibitors spread over the Fashion District created in via Tortona, it is not going to give up on the challenge of relaunching...
With a pragmatic and against the tide vision and without being too seduced by the futuristic hypotheses of virtual stores entrusted to digital and distance, Beppe Angiolini, ambassador of beauty through his flagship store in Arezzo, takes stock of the fashion system today and tomorrow. Without forgetting the past. An authoritative point of view, in his role as Director of Communication of the Italian Chamber of Buyers.
According to today’s opinions, on media, on webinars, the “fashion shop”, as we know it today, tomorrow will not work anymore. What do you think about this?
If the fashion shop will not work anymore it will certainly not be due to the introduction of multimedia systems and devices inside it. If this won’t work it will be due to the economical crisis that will not allow it and because anyone working for the shop itself, as sales assistant and/or buyer will not be able to interpret the emotional change that this moment has brought mainly to the final consumer’s choices...
40 years ago, in March 1980, Donna was born, the magazine that renewed fashion publishing and became Vogue's most formidable antagonist, and would have been for many years to come. The story tells that in 1963 the designer and art director of an innovative and prestigious Vogue Italia was Flavio Lucchini, the same who 17 years later would have created the new magazine, once again able to revolutionize the image and communication of fashion itself.
This is the memory of the editorial adventure that generated Donna, an unforgettable magazine published by Edimoda (Rizzoli Group/Corriere Della Sera and later Rusconi) that spoke of new fashion, new ways, new worlds with an avant-garde cut that would make it contemporary even today. Its startling covers, always different, always provocative and punctual, highlighting the new Made in Italy (but not only). And other preferably Italian talents. The collaborators are stellar: front-page journalists, writers, intellectuals, sociologists, artists. Very talented photographers, from Oliviero Toscani to other future stars such as Giovanni Gastel, Fabrizio Ferri, Paolo Roversi…
We asked an exceptional testimonial: Massimiliano Bizzi, founder and beating heart of White Show, the research fashion show that has become the most important contemporary fashion event in Italy. He settled at Superstudio in 2002 , from that moment he began an incomparable growth and success. With White during Fashion Weeks fashion invades the whole Tortona area: more than 500 companies bring their message of creativity always with increasing attendance and interest. And now? In this short video Bizzi gives voice to everyone’s concerns: less fashion but smarter, more attentive purchases to people, sustainability as a primary value.
The post Covid-19. "I think that fashion must accelerate a process of innovation, which had already started before: that of mega production, of fashion that no longer has the ability to excite the final consumer. The fashion of the past, elegant, that made you dream, has become a fashion instrumental to marketing, somehow closed in on itself...
The restart after the lockdown makes you think about the fate that suddenly forces you to change direction and, often, life. Here we repropose an extraordinary story with an autobiographical book and film. That of Flavio Lucchini, president of Superstudio Group who, as Oliviero Toscani said "was the real creator of the birth of made in Italy".
It is difficult to imagine that that boy born in the Mantuan countryside, raised in the difficulties of the war and probably destined to be a farmer like the whole family - but with that unusual ability to know how to draw very well and to be passionate about art and architecture - could find his way in a completely different world, that of fashion, creating the most important newspapers and raising the most famous designers. The final goal of his long and varied path is Superstudio, founded a long time ago, in a certain sense the sum of his interests, after having been with equal success teacher art-director journalist editor entrepreneur and simultaneously, for the past thirty years, artist who investigates the mysteries of fashion in order to give it a sort of eternity...
A live conversation to share knowledge and perspectives between Gisella Borioli, CEO Superstudio Gruop, and Giulio Cappellini, Art Director and Istituto Marangoni Brand Ambassador.
Instagram live on Thursday 30th April h 5.30 pm at IstitutoMarangoni_Milano Design | Superstudiogroup profiles.
In English.
Is fashion art photography destined to succumb in front of the advance of mobile phone photos or realized for the fast communication of the web? Giovanni Gastel, photographer, artist, poet and number one of artistic fashion and top quality image replies. His photos live on the most important international magazines and in the museums that talk about contemporaneity.
The fashion world and its way of communicating, how will they emerge from this period of world blockage? Certainly it will be necessary to think deeply about the ways and times of fashion communication but also the message of fashion itself will have to change profoundly.
Print media, for a century, the only «communicating voice of fashion» suffers from a deep crisis given by the increasingly modest contribution of advertising. The magazines themselves close their doors as a result of this «a dog chasing its own tail»: no advertising no magazines no advertising. The imagined entry into the communication of the web is struggling to recover because of the terrible lack of poetry that these media convey...
Dear Giorgio,
I remember like you when fashion, a small and little considered thing in Italy, began to grow and become a beautiful, big, ours, serious thing, which brought into play all hopes and creativity. We have seen it transform and create the made in Italy and we have given it the best. We, Flavio and me and our collaborators, from the magazines we gradually created and directed, Vogue, L'Uomo Vogue, Donna, Mondo Uomo, Moda... You, first with Sergio who we are still missing, and then with all the others your excellent first-time collaborators, Rosanna, Leo, Silvana, Irene, Giovanna and many others. You never stopped. Since you were already appreciated as an assistant of Nino Cerruti, and then from those few rooms in Corso Venezia that saw your first fashion show, to the already important venue in via Durini, up to your empire ...
Armani, Prada, Versace, Dolce&Gabbana, Gucci, Trussardi, Moncler, Zegna, Benetton ... and many many more. They are the big of fashion that we meet every day at Superstudio 13, our photo studio where they make their very blinding shooting. For once, all united in a generous gesture that wants to help Italy in the terrible situation of the coronavirus. King Giorgio was the first with a millionaire donation that showed the way to other brands and also among the first to reconvert all his companies to produce lab coats and medical devices for hospital workers because "all Giorgio Armani is sensitive to this reality and is close to all of you: from the stretcher bearer to the nurse, from general practitioners to all specialists in the sector. I am personally close to you". Prada donated two complete intensive care stations ...
In conjunction with the last days of Fashion Week in February, the health crisis has also dramatically affected fashion. In Milan, fashion shows behind closed doors, virtual fashion shows, fashion shows cancelled were the first responses of the fashion system that since then is frozen: shops, companies, orders, shopping it's all quiet, all closed. A very serious situation for this fundamental voice of national GDP and employment. From the first message of a retailer to thousands of emails received in recent days, came the spontaneous and viral movement "TOGETHER WE ARE STRONGER" that has become a free association without charges, composed of small and medium-sized enterprises and craft businesses that sees firsthand the White fair and Confartigianato. An association set up to tackle the current situation in a cohesive manner and ...
Extremely reserved, unreachable, even algid: who is actually Giorgio Armani? The new book by Tony di Corcia published by Cairo Editore, tries to answer this question by interviewing journalists, fashion designers and important figures of culture, top models, actresses, going through the steps of an extraordinary existence that begins with its own brand in 1975 that then originated an international empire. On the fashion designer’s 85th birthday (11th July), Superstudio hosted the first preview of the presentation of the book that according to the author’s will, concentrates on the man, narrating Giò’s (as his mother Maria used to call him) childhood, fondness, friendships, personalities, feelings...
If Milan has become the first example of city where fashion determines character, design is a global phenomenon, creativity talks the languages of the world, urban fabric is spotted with temporary-locations and the Fuorisalone has become a model imitated in many capitals, maybe thanks a bit to destiny, in addition to its illuminated pioneers. This is, at least what Flavio Lucchini claims, founder and president of Superstudio Group, but also editor and artist, protagonists of the creative Milan since 1960, whose yesterday’s choices have contributed to the Milan of today. This is what Lucchini describes, as author, in his last book “IL DESTINO – dovevo fare il contadino ma ho incontrato la moda (e non sono uno stilista)”, a first person path through the golden years of fashion and the encountering with great fashion designers, intellectuals, well-known photographers, artists of the time, social revolutions. How and why are born from his background as journalist and art-director, Superstudio 13 large hub for photography and fashion image, Superstudio Più for design, creativity, innovation, big events.
If the exhibition arranged by Oroblù, lingerie and hosiery leader, was meant to celebrate its thirty years in collaboration with Giovanni Gastel and Flavio Lucchini that resulted in an exhibition combining the photographer’s magical clics with the art work splendours by the artist, just finished in MyOwnGallery, is to a book curated by Gisella Borioli, that Oroblù asks to immortalize the magical encounter and thank all those who have contributed and participated to the success of the company and event. “Inspiration” is a precious publication, with golden cover, in limited edition, presents inside a little slipcase, that marks a new Oroblù path towards palpable renovation and placement in the highest and most yearned for category of the market. With works by Lucchini and famous poets’ quotes that highlight the feminine beauty.