VI VALENTINA ILARDI SS23
With its poetic, eclectic, and breakthrough vocation, VI VALENTINA ILARDI debuts during the
MFW official calendar presented a live installation that responds to the moment of crisis of the pre-established order, to the creative encroachment between the different disciplines, with a refined and contemporary unity between the arts. The iconic Nilufar Gallery in Via della Spiga turned into a space for experimentation and dialogue between fashion and design: the showcase became a scene of performative action, where different languages intersect in a dimension that cancels the usual chronological coordinates. In an idea of fashion connected to the dynamic use of the city and its spaces, the RETRO – FUTURE collection meets the romantic design of Daniele Innamorato’s carpets, the liquid depth of Draga and Aurel’s plexiglass, the icasticity of Ico Parisi’s Fifties armchairs or the imposing candlesticks of the Swedish design master Agne Jakobsson.
Through an idea of the future that has its roots in the past, Valentina Ilardi has imagined a collection where different shapes, silhouettes, and temporalities overlap each other to reflect on the role of fashion today. The RETRO – FUTURE collection represents a feminine point of view, which combines poetry and technology, filtered by that archive of experiences that the designer has collected all over the world in her work as a stylist, in an ideal wardrobe of interchangeable and overlapping garments. Layers and street sensations, combined with the warmth of precious and sustainable fabrics, define complex and layered shapes of contrasting materials. A fragmented and contemporary aesthetic for a collection that allows infinite possibilities of combination, which adapts to real and imaginary journeys, up to the transposition into other dimensions, parallel universes, and Metaverse. A grunge and romantic sensibility that of Valentina Ilardi that sinks into contrasts, in asynchronous volutes: from certain pieces stolen from the wardrobe of sportsmen, such as cyclist leggings inlaid with lace and net, to volumes and drapes that seem to evoke the Gilded Age and the world of high fashion deconstructed in technical fabric, up to the younger culture of the American West Coast and certain fetish touches of the Berlin clubbing of the 90s.
Words Alessio de Navasques
Photography Leonardo Casalini
