POLIMODA SHOW 2015

Gilded mirrors, soft lighting, international guests and the garden full of people. It seems to be in one of those wonderful hotels that survived the Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, waiting for the collection of the latest child prodigy who will change fashion for ever, but actually is June 16th and I am at the Polimoda Show 2015 in Florence to see the 20 best collections from the Polimoda Fashion Design Course led by Patrick De Muynck.

As I said, it seems to be in Paris, not only for the international atmosphere that you can feel in a worldwide known institute like this, but also (and especially) for the themes and the formal choices featuring the collections of the Polimoda Show 2015.

Polimoda Show 2015

Tre anni di conquiste, sconfitte, frustrazioni e traguardi di ogni studente si

The three years of achievements, failures, frustrations and goals of the students are now materialized in just 8 outfits each. The collections represent the final step of 20 different intimate researches for the creative identity of each designer, and they provoke very different emotions in the audience. And during this type of fashion shows, the reaction of the guests is exactly what I like to watch the most: awe, wonder, enthusiasm, admiration, but also disapproval and confusion, especially in front of the clothes that lay on the border between fashion and performing art.

Unfortunately not everybody can understand the human and creative path that lies behind these experimental collections. The graduating runway is like a debut in the fashion world, and in such an occasion, you cannot think to reduce a life-researching-path into something that is just good for marketing, according to the logic of the ready-to-wear or fast fashion.

Surely the students have been trained for years in making appealing clothes for the market and once graduated, they will also practice that by designing the commercial lines of the best known Made in Italy brands; but the purpose of the graduation show is to bring out their creative vision that, despite the several references to well-known designers, it is and will always be unique and original. And that’s what really matters.

Therefore, welcome to: the experimental denim fabric doubled with lettuce leaves for the Pourpoint jackets by Samira Yusifova; the floral Pulcinella by Alessandro Trincone; the high tech clothes by Alice Saltarelli for a “Journey to the Center of the Earth” featured by impalpable fabrics in the shades of the hazy skies of Iceland; the perception of the reality by Cecilia Sertori, made of LED screens, branching veins, cables and leather; the tribute to the Jewish origins of Ksenia Novakovskaia with elementary forms that refer to the cyclical nature of the world; the traditional Turkish costumes by Utku Serkan Zengin revisited for the contemporary dandies; the Buddhist-inspired ghost clothes by Min Yu Park, that remind also the Flemish portraits of the fifteenth century; the delicate fur mosaics by Violante Toscani; the skirts and crinolines for men by Ambra Inghilleri; the women figures embroidered on the long silhouette by Benedetta Bianchini, combined with resin armor and ceramic shoes; the poetry of Moorish decorations of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, that turn into the external structures of the male clothing by Pio Boserman; the neo-surrealism dresses by Leonor De Assis Ferreira with couture embroidery and sprawling shirts; the wonderful floral inlays for the hunter-poets’s clothes by Matilde Gennari; and finally, the oxymorons of Anzhelika Balaeva, who combines the futuristic materials and silhouettes from the film Solaris, with the textures of the traditional Russian needlepoint.

Alessandro Masetti – The Fashion Commentator