By Rebecca Ceccatelli, Giulia Piceni, Isabella Trew. Cover image: Stefano Concutelli.
A tableau vivant and a shrine that condenses art, history, and craftsmanship: this is the frame of the Istituto Marangoni Firenze Fashion Show 23-24, The Witness.
A multifaceted word that evokes multiple meanings: which of them could be the right one? Follow the index below to unlock the polyphony that The Witness represents.
INDEX
BECOMING A WITNESS
What is the role of the audience in the creative process? How can a School nurture its talents?
Istituto Marangoni Firenze is more than a place of higher learning: it is an incubator of creativity, a cocoon nurturing the inventiveness of its talents: a witness to their maturation and achievements. And it’s exactly to these human relations, to this artistic blossoming that this year’s Fashion Show is dedicated to.
Therefore the objective of the show is to transform the public from a simple spectator to an active witness of the creative process that gave life to the final collections of the ten Best Fashion Design students of Istituto Marangoni Firenze.
In this sense, The Witness wants to give the audience all the instruments necessary to decode the collections, putting it on the same level of the tutors and professionals that followed their creative process. As a matter of fact, process has been a keyword in the planning of the show: what better way to reveal a student’s growth than through the journey behind it?
On this basis, the audience will not only experience the uniqueness of each designer through a performative runway, but also through the behind-the-scenes work showcased in the exhibition to explore the designers’ inner worlds.
SCHEDULE OF THE NIGHT
Once they get to the location around 7.00 pm, the guests are invited to kindly proceed to the first floor, to the ballroom, where the runway is going to take place, starting at 7.20 pm. There, they are going to find their own names on the seats distributed n the two dedicated rooms.
After the runway show, at 8:00 pm the audience is invited to go back to the ground floor and enter the Exhibition, to further experience the Designers’ collections.
After the visit, the audience will exit into the garden and enjoy the rest of the evening.
- From 7:00 pm Entrance
- From 7:20 pm Runway
- From 8:00 pm Exhibition Opening and Cocktail in the Garden
THE LOCATION: AN ARTS SHRINE IN BORGO PINTI
The location selected for The Witness condenses a wide variety of past timelines. Palazzo Ximenes-Panciatichi was commissioned by the architect brothers Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo who conceived it as a personal museum in which to place works by artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Paolo Uccello and Antonio del Pollaiolo.
“We chose Palazzo Ximènes Panciatichi as the venue for our Fashion Show,” affirms Lorenzo Tellini, School Director of the Istituto Marangoni Firenze, “because it represents a perfect harmony between the styles of the numerous craftsmen who have worked there over the centuries, witnessing the evolution of Florence. The frescoes and stuccoes that adorn the rooms become theatrical backdrops, challenging stage narratives and contemporary stories. In this context, the ten collections of the Best Fashion Designers of Istituto Marangoni Firenze can express themselves in a polyphony of voices, inviting the audience to witness – hence the title of the event – ten different worlds, to contemplate and experience like a marvelous tableau vivant between craftsmanship and new technologies.”
THE RUNWAY
Istituto Marangoni Firenze has applied a new approach to this year’s Fashion Show. As a matter of fact, instead of presenting under one single theme the works of the ten selected designers, each collection is showcased accompanied by tailor-made styling, grooming and soundtrack.
“The Witness represents a great challenge for the School for two reasons,” explains Francesca Giulia Tavanti, Director of Education at Istituto Marangoni Firenze. “On one hand, it involves rethinking the Fashion show to give the right tension and visibility to each universe created by the designers, emphasizing their individuality. On the other hand, for the first time, we involved students from other areas of the School. This makes it not only interdisciplinary but also a collective effort from all departments: nothing comes from external sources, everything you see here tonight has been created by the School itself”.
Special mention to the sound design of the runway, conceived by sound artist and tutor at Istituto Marangoni Firenze Emiliano Zelada, in dialogue with the ten Best Designers which provided song references as a starting point to expand their research as music moodboards. Therefore the soundtrack presents a chorus of different sounds and aural experiences to best represent the collectivity of voices inside the runway. On top of that, A new song titled The Witness, composed in dialogue with AI, will bring the sonic experience together.
Now that the show is about to start, find your seat and please, become a Witness.
THE RUNNING ORDER: TEN COLLECTIONS, AN ODE TO PLURALITY
Greta Peccia, THREAD OF OPPOSITES
The collection explores life as personal growth: a journey that begins within the ancestral protection of the family, a comfort zone where, as one grows, an internal conflict arises from the desire for emancipation clashing with the tendency to remain sheltered. These oppositions and rebellions eventually balance out with a new maturity marked by awareness.
This journey is told through an evolution where materials become metaphors, reflecting individual growth through diversity. Lace, white crochet, and felt transform into knitted works made with traditional techniques, evolving into more sophisticated and experimental creations. The designer uses bacteria as threads in her models. Kombucha, a drink made from tea, yeast, and bacteria combined with sugar and left to ferment, is used as a new skin, a metaphor for a newly achieved identity.
Max Putrino, GENERATIVE MAN
This collection celebrates a delicate masculinity, characterised by resilience alongside its more fragile and emotional side. The volumes and shapes speak of a man looking towards the future: garments inspired by the technical clothing of motorcyclists, designed to protect and endure. It’s a forward-looking perspective that doesn’t lose sight of the emotional sphere, as told through the details of the garments imagined through a lengthy process of 3D design and produced using professional printers for applications and jewellery, and jacquard knitting for the sweaters.
The man narrated by Putrino believes in resilience and progress: he uses technology to increase sustainable production, survives combining the freedom of the digital world to face the issues of the real one.
Nora Bagdasaroglu, UNKNOWN JOURNEY
The brightness of the pastel colours transmitted by Turkish fabrics wants to wake us up: from a sleeping passive society, we need to unveil our spirituality. Each garment is created with the hand stitch technique called Canadian Smoke, creating a flexible yet voluminous armour, similar to an exoskeleton. As a designer, Nora Bagdasaroglu invites us to embrace not only the external universe but also the inner one with a holistic approach: in her design, all the elements are stitched and connected to the previous one, creating a flow that symbolises the domino effect, each choice, each journey is connected to the others.
Anna Gervasi, ESSENZA
Anna Gervasi’s process to design her women’s collection is a journey through a memorial of the loss of her father: sepia photographs of his younghood as a soldier provide the starting point for translating the now distant uniform into a soft garment, an extra-large Casentino wool coat that wraps the body in a warm and tender embrace. The colour palette gathers the sepia atmosphere of old family pictures, the blue of the sea and of glitter of the sparkling nights that reconnect us to the memory of unforgettable beloved with the lulling of the waves and the dream space that can still act as a meeting point for distant family members.
Matilde Tasselli, Reminisce Haven
The slow transition from a chrysalis to a grandiose butterfly, Reminisce Haven is a collection depicting the absurd process of growth in a life cycle. Inspired by her grandmother’s crochet lace collar skills Matilde Tasselli frees the human shape into an absurd voluminous shape, a clownish distortion with a garment construction in skirts similar to the 17th century women’s skirt. Each outfit is created by adding layers of ruffles, fabric made with deadstock fabrics collected by entering in contact with expert seamstresses in Prato in Tuscany. The garments are supported by hidden structures made with hula hoops that help the skirts to perform as birdcages.
Yanni Malhotra, Ikái
The collection Ikái (Unity in Armony) is focused on the role of the female body in Indian society by letting the Western taboos of the British colonisation emerge. One of them is the topic of female nudity: nakedness is a sign of spirituality in India and the traditional Sari is proof of that by showing the back. The garments presented emphasise the canon based on mathematical calculations useful to create a visual balance between veiled and unveiled skin that has to be with a proportion of 50 and 50. The collection is realised in India with the help and human support of more than 20 people led by Malhotra in the form of a slow but intense workshop with women members of the non-profit society named Swami Sivananda Memorial Institute of Fine Arts & Crafts based in New Delhi. The meticulous art of the hand stitching intertwining coloured threads embodies a spiritual collection that speaks of roots, female awareness, and magic for both Indian and European women.
Sophia Cuomo, BOY TO MAN
The collection explores the evolution of the male figure from boyhood to adulthood. It originates from the study of a particular ceremony held in England in the 1800s, the breeching ceremony, which marked the moment when male children reaching the age of six could start wearing trousers instead of dresses and petticoats like their sisters, signifying a predetermined maturity achieved. The process behind the collection is characterised by the gathering of jeans and shirts for teens that are then deconstructed for being adapted to paper patterns: up-cycled garments to fit with asymmetrical lines on adult man sizes. The aim is to prove that garments and boys are dealing with the same process of growing up, from making mistakes til finding a proper identity step by step.
Tara Pitoni, Clouded Conscience
The collection delves into the intricate landscape of our subconscious, navigating the realms of dreams, nightmares, and awakening. Colors saturate, and mushrooms grow to improbable sizes, crafting an enchanting yet enigmatic world that captivates the senses. However, this ethereal scene is disrupted by the intrusion of nightmares. The hand-made crochet and knitting can have the shape of suffocating balaklava, as well as colorful flowers as in a Grimms’ Fairy Tales in which something joyful and attractive can unveil a trap to pay attention to.
Sergio Catania, FLOATING CONCRETE
Sergio Catania’s garments are nostalgic creations longing for the style of 20th-century urbanism, Le Corbusier’s architecture, and the Brutalist movement, defined by the wonders of the new material, the concrete. It is from this movement that the collection draws shapes, materials, and concepts. Indeed, just like a Le Corbusier Unité d’habitation, sartorially speaking, the garments are conceived as modules, to “fit perfectly on the person or persons who will wear it”, explains Catania. The foundations of the line-up are the manipulations in which concrete is layered on denim and wool with a sartorial creative method: the encounter between fabrics and real concrete defines on a structural and formal level the details and looks of its final garments.
Angela Huang, Si Alza Il Vento
The title is an homage to the poetry of Paul Valery and the delicate fantasy of Hayao Miyazaki. Taking inspiration from the study of lights on the landscape by William Turner, the collection unveils the feelings of human beings and the concept of being-in-nature. Vortical shapes are leading the line-up resuming the colours of a day: passing from the sunrise to the deep night. Embroideries, plissè, and organza are twisted by an imaginative wind. The vortexes are imagined and created thanks to the use of AI, integrating technology with the sensitivity of human nature.
6. THE EXHIBITION: A GROUP SHOW THAT BRINGS FASHION AND ART TOGETHER
Located on the ground floor of the Palazzo Ximenes-Panciatichi, the Exhibition expands the designers’ visions through both digital and physical installations, allowing the guests to enter inside the inspirations and ideas behind the collections. A glimpse of hand-made craftsmanship along with the digital revolution: the two key elements defining the designers of the future.
In the exhibition space, multiple identities coexist: materials, tools, and research books of the Fashion Designers are in dialogue with new artworks conceived for this occasion by the students from the Multimedia Arts course.
Every room is a different environment, where the inner world of each designer can take shape through a game of assonances and contrasts between artworks and garments, fueling a dialogue suspended between research, art, and fashion.
Entrance and First Environment
0. Rosina Bella, The Witness, 2024. HD video, silent, 1’27”
1. Max Putrino, 3D printer machine, 3D printed PLA shoes prototypes, Clo3D video animation from the collection Generative Man
2. Angela Huang, 8 channel video installation, AI generated portraits, Clo3D video animation from the collection Si Alza il Vento
What if the Romantic would meet the man of tomorrow? From the harsh lines of the machines to the soft lines of the sublime nature. This first environment is founded on apparent contrasts: two antipodal timelines both seeking for a truer connection to the world around.
The mechanical chiming of the 3D printer welcomes the guests in the first environment of the exhibition. Coming from the left, the noise belongs to the installation reserved for the designer Max Putrino and his final collection Generative Man. Representing the instability of the uncertain times to come, the 3D-printed accessories cast a spotlight on the very human feeling of vulnerability that springs from the technological future that has invaded our times.
Following, an eight-channel video installation showcases AI-generated portraits: part of the research by Angela Huang for Si Alza il Vento. A collection reminiscent of Romanticism, the tension towards the natural world sees a further layer of interpretation since the installation setting has been enriched with further animated 3D designs of her collection.
Second Environment
3. Antonella Ramos, Do Jism Ek Jaan, 2024. HD video, 2’20”
4. Yanni Malhotra, crocheted outfit with bangles from the collection Ikái
5. Nora Bagdasaroglu, Clo3D video animation, outfit from the collection Unknown Journey
6. Greta Peccia, manual knitting machine, outfit from the collection Thread of Opposites
7. Lorenzo Risani, SCOBY, 2024. HD video, 1’40”
This fundamental concept finds expression in diverse realms, from the microscopic world of bacteria of kombucha to traditional threads of Indian, and even in the realms of abstract inner ideas.
Immerse yourself in the behind-the-scenes journey with Yanni Malhotra as she unveils her ethereal threads collection. Discover the stories and people who collaborated with her to bring her dream collection to life. Watch as the designer artfully weaves together her European and Indian heritage through the intricate threads of her crochet designs.
Meanwhile, Nora Bagdasaroglu’s creations demonstrate their levity both in physical and digital form, performing her lightness both on screen and on mannequins.
Finally, within this dynamic ecosystem, the artist Lorenzo Risani recreates the liquid choreography of fluids used by the designer Greta Peccia to enrich her garments, as she used kombucha to generate lively micro-interactions in her fabrics. Sprinkling, splattering, and spurting, inks and liquids take on a life of their own in the silent watery world of Lorenzo Risani’s video. Like an alchemist, the artist captures the beauty of this playful pinkish liquid bringing the audience closer to a microscopic world of silent interactions.
Third Environment
8. Tara Pitoni, outfit from the collection Clouded Conscience
9. Francesco Agazio, Under the Spotlight, 2023. HD video, 0’30” loop
10. Matilde Tasselli, Clo3D video animation, outfit from the collection Reminisce Haven
A circus of perception. As you enter, you find yourself traversing the realms of a vivid unconscious reality. Perception shapes reality, yet these designers have deftly manipulated her inner world by probing the subconscious cues that govern the senses.
In this realm, Tara Pitoni and Matilde Tasselli have modified the logic of this dimension, enhancing it with saturated color and texture. Mirrors serve not merely as reflective surfaces but as amplifiers of self-perception, illuminating the delicate dance of the subtle transition from a state of conscious awareness to the vulnerable embrace of sleep.
Masters of construction and crochet, these designers artfully juxtapose the stark shadows of black against vibrant bursts of color alongside a glimpse of their animated progress through Clo3D video and in dialogue with the nightmare landscape of Francesco Agazio’s corridor of eyes.
Fourth Environment
11. Asia Niero, THROUGH, 2023-2024. HD video, 3’09”
12. Anna Gervasi, memorabilia which inspired the collection ESSENZA
Vivid memories and scenes of a past that hasn’t truly faded away. Another dimension viewed through a screen, transporting you back to moments once lived—the beach, the stones, their touch. A game of shadows interplays within the narrative, suggesting that it’s not just what we see, but rather what we feel.
The room hosts the tribute of a daughter who experienced the loss of a father. Slow and fluid waves bring back memories and scenes from the past. In dialogue with the artwork of Asia Niero, the garments of a father, a male figure, central in creating Anna Gervasi’s female collection, are facing the ocean waves filmed by Asia Niero. A sea where ashes can be scattered, to create a neverending encounter. A blue that is more than a tint in a garment. It is a desire, a memory. A statement.
Fifth Environment
13. Margie Mitchem, Man to Man, 2024. HD video, 1’29”
14. Sophia Cuomo, garment installation from the collection Boy to Man
15. Sergio Catania, Clo3D video animation, concrete manipulations, concrete waxed trousers from the collection Floating Concrete
16. Duccio Maria Gambi, Séparer, 2018. Courtesy of Duccio Maria Gambi
Sophia Cuomo and Sergio Catania explore the realm of construction. Both of their work transcends the mere creation of garments, delving into the construction of identities. Cuomo dives into the passage fron a boy to men in dialogue with Margaret Mitchem’s video, a collection of evidence immortalised by an old camera, yet it aptly captures the intricacies of male identities in society.
Boys, the offspring of men who were once boys themselves, form a sequence that narrates beyond the confines of time and mere masculinity. The closet of this little boy coexists with Sergio Catania’s brutalist architecture style, inside of his research where concrete has the ability to float.
To highlight his environment, a series of concrete blocks evokes a sensation of heaviness within space. Anti-decorative, yet monumental statement, this work by Duccio Maria Gambi seems to be a citizen of Sergio Catania’s world, a world he created where concrete has the ability to float.
THE WITNESS – CREDITS
Istituto Marangoni Firenze
School Director: Lorenzo Tellini
Director of Education: Francesca Giulia Tavanti
Fashion Design
Programme leader: Miguel García Abad
Tutors: Stefano Peloso, Brenda Cecchi, Luigi Veccia
Students: Greta Peccia, Matilde Tasselli, Anna Gervasi, Sophia Cuomo, Yanni Malhotra, Angela Huang, Nora Bagdasaroglu, Max Putrino, Tara Pitoni, Sergio Catania, Martina La Gatta, Deniz Basbug, Gabriele Zeverino, Jessica Borgioli, Chiara Guastella, Rachele Boschi, Elis Musova, Eleonora Maccarone, Melina Shibli, Sara Pizzo, Regina Branca
Fashion Styling
Course leader: Odile Orsi
Tutors: Sara Mautone, Jacopo Battisti
Students: Elisa Cresci, Carlotta Corsetti, Emma Innocenti, Manuela Juan, Andrea Mattia, Margherita Mangani, Micaela Marigliano, Caterina Pendula, Ginevra Rosi
Fashion Business
Programme leader: Valentina Grigoletto
Students: Elisa Camporesi, Jasmin Kusumaningsih, Angela Fera, Sofia Ferri, Gaia Puliatti, Juliana Rezende Vargas, Margherita Brogioni, Haruka Ajiki, Francesco Manni, Anisia Bazanova, Ivette Villa, Matilde Magi, Giorgia Martorana, Carmela Serra
Art Area
Course leaders: Davide Daninos, Carolina Gestri
Tutors: Stefano Concutelli, Roberto Fassone, Giacomo Raffaelli, Enrico Visani, Emiliano Zelada
Students: Francesco Agazio, Rebecca Ceccatelli, Naufal Marras, Margie Mitchem, Claudia Musolino, Asia Niero, Antonella Ramos, Giulia Piceni, Lorenzo Risani, Isabella Trew
External Jurors
Annagreta Panconesi (Creative Director of LuisaViaRoma), Giuliana Matarrese (Fashion and Culture journalist), Luca Rizzi (Consulting Director of Pitti Immagine), Gabriele Giorgini (Head of Global Press at Gucci), Luca Lin (Creative Director of ACTN1), Giulia e Camilla Venturini (Creative Direction of Medea Sisters), Stefano Chiassai (Founder of Studio Chiassai), Beppe Angiolini (Founder of Sugar store) and Corinna Chiassai (Design Director and Co-founder of TheCube Archive)
Communication
Elisa Losio • Head of Communication
Laura Bonadies • Group PR, Media Relations & Event Manager
Beatrice Scivetti • Social Media Specialist
Lucrezia Mangani • Digital, Social Media & Events Strategist Specialist
Production
Monogrid
Casting
Monogrid
Hair & Make-up
Monacelli Italy
The House of Hair
Graphic Design
Enrico Visani
3D animation
Stefano Concutelli, Stefano Vasile
Sponsors and Partnerships
Chargeurs PCC
Monacelli Italy
The House of Hair
Matilda Ricami
MOST
Press Office
Carla Cordiano • Ploom Pr
Special Thanks
Duccio Maria Gambi
