curated by Alessio De Navasques
Milan, 3rd March 2025 – 10·Corso·Como presents The Waves, an exhibition project that highlights the stories of five of the most radical and talented brands and young designers on the international scene, in a single, fluid installation.
Renewing its vocation for research into fashion and new imagery, in the imprint of the new vision given by Tiziana Fausti, 10·Corso·Como has selected ALL-IN, Duran Lantink, Hodakova, Vaquera, zomer for its ecosystem as the most innovative voices of a narrative that transcends the boundaries of dress and evokes contemporary tensions.
The designers’ collections will also be on sale exclusively in the Milan concept store.
‘Within the 10·Corso·Como ecosystem, where cultural design, lifestyle and fashion live on exchanges and iterations, The Waves focuses on five new fashion protagonists in a special, polyphonic tale, where alongside their respective identities a new sense of time stands out, moving between past and future,’ says Tiziana Fausti.
Taking its title from Virginia Woolf’s most mysterious novel, The Waves evokes the perpetual motion par excellence – that of the waves – as a metaphor for pure time, a circular present, in which, as stated by curator Alessio de’Navasques; “The collections of the selected designers seem to return to the past and transport it into the modern day, in that infinite rhythm of quotations and references that fashion succeeds in molding through what the German philosopher Walter Benjamin defined as the “tiger’s leap”: the constant capacity of the creative process for reinvention.”
The route, in linear mode, exalts the most significant creations of each brand – including a number of custom-made pieces – evoking the novel’s monologue structure: different languages and sensibilities, united by a new idea of tailoring, with rich, experimental, expressionist forms, inspired by the confrontation with themes such as sustainability, reuse, relationship with nature, gender identity, materiality. Practices such as reuse and upcycling, seem to be a part of a contemporary lexicon, become quotations, in a post-production aesthetic that rediscovers the forms of high craftsmanship, reconnecting past and future, in a dense and vibrant present.
ALL-IN, founded by Benjamin Barron and Bror August Vestbø, among the LVMH Prize finalists, can be considered a laboratory of the contemporary: established as an independent magazine becoming a collection, it is centered around recontextualizing existing garments, depicting familiar yet unplaceable characters.
A playful and colourful vein guides Danial Aitouganov and Imruh Asha, founders of zomer, nominated for the LVMH Prize, in an instinctive process that brings together heterogeneous materials to create fabric architectures on which a dramatic and artificial nature flourishes, like an imaginary garden.
Belts, zips, parts of fur coats, but also items such as boots or rags, define a new dimension of research, as the hallmark of Swedish designer Ellen Hodakova Larsson, founder of the Hodakova brand that has been included in Paris Fashion Week since March 2025: a reflection on the dynamics of production and consumption, through the use of humble materials.
Re-use is also central to Duran Lantink’s research into a new definition of the body and gender identity: from the enveloping and protective volumes to the Sistaaz of the Castle project, two pieces of which are on display, developed by the designer in Cape Town to support the non-profit organisation SistaazHood, which protects the rights of a group of transgender sex workers.
New forms of escapism characterise the American collective Vaquera, founded by Patric DiCaprio, who was joined by Bryn Taubensee as co-creative director, in an effort to rethink fashion as a medium capable of giving spectacular form to all types of identities, demolishing the normative standards of beauty and body, and rendering fashion permeable to all types of subcultures and the avant-garde.
So, the rarefied and suspended space of the 10·Corso·Como Gallery hosts in the distinct voices of its protagonists, a choral and dissonant snapshot, a vision in which “the complex fashion system remains a fascinating field of conversation amid the new waves being offered up”, as Alessio de’Navasques concludes in the accompanying text.
The Waves benefits from the valuable partnership with Bonaveri, for the sartorial mannequins made especially for the project.
