Eco-fashion-designer of Italian-Austrian origin, Agostina Zwilling is an artist who investigates processes, scenarios, methodologies and best practices in design.

Using the nunofelt technique, she creates works ranging from interior design (fibre walls, paintings, carpets, tapestries etc.) to clothing.

Shapes and colours are moulded by hand, through a slow process that goes from massaging silk, wool, cashmere, linen, hemp, beech, etc., to choosing the plants, flowers and roots that make up the chromatic bases.

Each garment is a unique work, an actual size development is impossible, because the finishes become unrepeatable and the manipulation generates new nuances and details each time. Even the idea of a definitively finished work is inconceivable. The fibres move, change with time, depending on the wearer’s use and silhouette.

Nunofelt is dynamic by nature and, in Zwilling’s work, lends itself to a correspondence with the concept of the ‘open work’, understood as an artwork.

whose aesthetic, formal or material identity is not defined once and for all, but is subject to factors of variability that make it, to a greater or lesser extent, always different. (Cit. Umberto Eco)

But it is also open in its possibility of being interpreted in ways that vary according to the sensitivity and emotions of those who encounter it.

Zwilling’s is not a clothing line, but represents a true philosophy of life that aggregates and connects training, creativity, sustainable supply chains, ethical and aesthetic awareness, according to an idea that weaving is a gesture that intersects human and social networks with the final product, without interruptions, as a responsible and circular action, in harmonious and conscious tension within a flow that smacks of art, anthropology, ecology, and in general of culture and beauty.

On the ivomilan.com you can discover the Zwilling private collection for autumn/winter 2023-24.

Agostina Zwilling is the founder of the Italian Felt Academy. The school is located in Verona town, Italy. For more information and contacts, you can visit the Italianfeltacademy.it

Below, a photographic tour in the experimental processes that characterize the work of the designer (the material is provided by Zwilling herself and all rights are reserved)

Agostina Zwilling eco felt designer by vocation.

Her world does not contemplate needles and scissors. Agostina does not sew: she unites. Agostina does not produce: she creates.

Her world does not contemplate needles and scissors. It winds and unwinds around a thread that is not just raw material, but also a relationship.It is the thread that ties different sensibilities, perceptions and intuitions together, making them into one story bursting with many differences. It is the experience of a common “feeling”. Agostina does not sew: she unites. Agostina does not produce: she creates. She loves to put together what has been damaged. Soothing, warming, wrapping. Even a tear is useful to her purpose: it is breaking the rule, the subversion of order in favour not of dis-order, but of Harmony. Her prime preoccupation (which we can identify with) is to propose a new “perception” of the world.

Agostina Zwilling, a felt-fashion-artist committed to spreading the ancient art of felt making in modern couture, is the founder of the Italian Felt Academy. The school was situated in Verona, Italy. For more information, visit  www.italianfeltacademy.it

We don’t have half-seasons anymore!

This popular saying has never been as real and true to its meaning. After two months of torrential rainfalls and winter temperatures, suddenly, summer is here.

During this period, it’s hard to choose what to wear, not to feel cold or suffer from the heat throughout the day. Incidentally, due to the difficulty of finding raw materials, the deliveries of the goods were delayed, which made the selection of the stores inconsistent and incoherent with the weights of the fabrics suitable during this season. Even making our catalog took a long time because we had to wait for the seasonal selection to arrive.

Now that we’ve finally finished this task, we can offer original combinations: the periodical Mix-and-Match, where we combine the garments on our catalog in fresh and alternative ways.

Here we are with Lucia, our model, outside of the static frame of our website, on the streets of Padua, near our store, combining garments and brands to discover new dimensions, chromatic palettes, and adaptability to contexts and formal or informal situations.

Noir Kei Ninomiya realized this skirt with the typical formal exuberance of the Japanese school. Its central theme is not the feminine silhouette but its narrative potential, which reveals multiple interpretations: from the pronounced femininity with the tapered gilet in washed linen and the fitted tube top in elastic silk froissé by Marc Le Bihan…

… to a more relaxed everyday expression with the oversized sweater by Album di Famiglia…

… or a sophisticated and uncommon ensemble with the sartorial jacket, hand finished, in linen and cotton gauze by Archivio JM Ribot.

With a different gaze, we can match this blueish gilet/shirt in washed linen by Forme d’Expression with this wide trousers in tubular knit made of linen and cotton by Archivio JM Ribot.

Ultimately we close this first June Mix and Match with a made-in-Italy outfit with this paint−like silk jacket printed bt the historic company Fissore, the neutral colors of the sage shirt by Album di Famiglia and the skirt made of a light linen, cashmere, and silk knit by Boboutic.

The bags are made in Italy by Amine and Numero 10, while the shoes are the Marisa’s by Trippen for Ivo Milan.

The first change of temperatures allows us to finally experience the autumn season even outside of the online dimension ‘catalogue‘ and of the daily spaces of the store.

Now you can place the garments within the colors and atmospheres of the period, imagining them in their potential and transversal recombinations. Our tutor Sari, on a Sunday in November, leads us into passionate mix and match where you can discover, from new perspectives, different items of the seasonal assortment.

The fantastic Italian cashmere F-Cashmere – i.e. Fissore, historic brand of the most noble yarn – with different color blocks and surprisingly soft hand, accompanies a wide, rustic skirt in English Donegal by Ricorrrobe, Anglo-Japanese new-entry. They close the ensemble: a knitted hat made of acrylic, nylon and mohair by Chisaki – directly from Japan – and one of the nap Lak leather bags of the cheerful South Tyrolean Maison, Zilla.

And one more, the interpretation of Noir – Kei Ninomiya collection, the most classic winter, eternal heavy knit with braids and Lapp workmanship in a piece of more feminine portability, thanks to a wide development of the sleeves, of a complex high neck/hood and ideal proportions for voluminous skirts, such as that in waxed cotton tartan always proposed by Ricorrrobe. A cool polar hat, all moldable and the revisitation of the typical historical aviator jacket, squeezed and resumed with daring tailoring seams, by Junya Watanabe, celebrate a coming winter of international evocative recognizability.

To close our appointment, a mix and match that mixes together a unique piece of the Nuno-felt designer by Emanuela Rovida, in organic merino wool and silk, handmade and fused with painterly skills from natural colors of shrubs and territorial plants, completely reversible and wearable front and back, seamless, combined with a skirt by Marc Le Bihan, from the refined fabric of gauze and boiled wool, worked together with three-dimensional bubbles. To cover the exceptional quality of the garments, a Forme d’Expression coat with a daily taste, comfortable, in a mélange jersey with a vibrant and intense blue, reverberated by the dazzling glitter of a metallic leather briefcase.

How many times in the shop has an occasional and distracted adventurer started with this exclamation: “Oh, yes, Issey Miyake, the perfumes one!“.

An expression that, in all its naive purity, revealed the striking distance between our work as promoters and popularizers of the so-called Japanese school and the public actually reached in the city. Maybe it also happened simultaneously with one of the many windows focused on a futuristic garment by Issey Miyake. Each time, that sound confirms the long way still to go and the burning frustration of being misunderstood. Without triggering a competition between the world of perfumes and that of clothes, even those who are not in the trade know how much his story belonged to the latter, with perfume being a typical gadget of the most established designers.

Yet not in Padova.

Bringing Issey Miyake to the city 24 years ago, when the brand still did not have a generalized fame and his perfume did not yet exist, did not create status, but only circulated within evolved global niches. This meant an important acceleration towards complexity and an indisputable recognition to the shop. First of all, in order to present it, the space had to have the aesthetic ‘requisites’ compatible with the strict philosophy of the Maison, whose concern for the future, rather than sales and the diffusion of the brand, was aimed at the defense of its cultural prestige. The staff of the Parisian showroom came personally to make sure everything was set and then gave us the green light that the collaboration between Ivo Milan and the company could begin in 1998.

And it was immediatly a great love what would become a long adventure; a challenge on the edge of the most heated creative tension, interrupted only by the closure of the store in 2020 (at the time we could not imagine being able to reopen) and by the inevitable advance of other local competitors…

It is useless to dwell on the unmpteenth narrative around the work of Issey Miyake because there are more expert pens than us that have written and are writing about it. In our own small way, we have had more opportunities to present the brand in its different lines (Pleats Please, BaoBao, Issey Miyake-Fête, A-Poc, 132. 5, Cauliflower) and the satellite ones of the group (Haat, A-net with Final Home, Plantation and Zucca). Since we have worked with all of them for a long time, we wanted to put a particular focus on the one that bears his name, offering it in its most daring, free and joyful expressions. We believe that bringing witness to this propulsive collaboration is the least we can do to the many people who, spontaneously, in these days, have contacted us to thank us for allowing them the opportunity to be so close to the best of Issey Miyake.

An overview of photos, articles, videos (many on our youtube channel) about this long journey together, with all the gratitude to the poetry that it has brought to our work… Thank you!

“It’s all hand finished!”

That’s what said one of the more expert tailors of the city while caressing with great care the endless length of the rim to be adjusted, bottom part of a cashmere coat so soft to the touch that fully captured her skilled sensitivity.

Even if Marta is pretty used to our ‘never-seen items’, with some pride I’ll say her: ‘Yes, it’s a Daniela Gregis’ coat, she works like that!’

Actually it’s not usual for the items of the designer from Bergamo to arrive to the tailor’s shop. Fit and proportions are so comfortable that they never need adjustments, and instead of removing even a single inch from her precious fabrics, it’s more usual to use the eyelets applied to the sides to fix a rim, and adjust the length with new creativity.

But that ice melange coat could not risk to be stepped on up and down the bridges in Venice, during the morning runs, or just put on the shoulder during the daily working routine of its lucky owner.

Daniela Gregis’ items have an amazing peculiarity: you can wear them, even considering their precious compositions, in everyday life.

When you’re in a hurry or when you’re fully distracted, they will never embarrass you! They’re interchangeable, they can be worn inside out, back to front or, for coats in general, even upside down. This is due to their construction which is designed from the very beginning, with patterns and fabrics, doubled or alternate, changing according to how they are worn. Thanks to all accurate and full finishing, Gregis’ clothes still keep a constant balance in all solutions, even the most unexpected.

In an apparently joyful attitude, her last collection, called Tintinba – evocative onomatopoeic sound of fragile instruments which, when in contact, can change into elementary and casual melodies – the Gregis’ creations offer infinite hypotheses and chromatic proposals, in fabrics and shapes, not sketched at all.

Harmonies can be composed with a unique complicity between colour themes and its best material creation: velvet, cashmere, silk, cotton, gauze, and so on. Each fibre assumes a pictorial and expressive responsibility becoming the interpreter of dominant seasonal feelings: the indefinite blue of winter skies, hot tones of strong chestnuts, cold notes of future and desired seasonal frosts.

That awareness can be found in textures and woven outlines in different colours, in the hugs of indifferent movements of stiff velvet and calm cashmere gauze, in the wrinkles of washed fabrics, from houndstooth to tone-on-tone patterns, to flawless and wide melange coils, from definitive silk, grabbed to rounded stitching, until stretched wool.

A show that starts little by little, because the creation is slow and fatiguing, and the season – we all know it – is the longest one…

Boboutic was born in the year 2000 from the close collaboration between the designer Michel Bergamo and the architect and photographer Cristina Zamagni, today both professors of Fashion Design at the IUAV University of Venice.

From its headquarter in Florence the brand develops, starting from the idea of the yarn as an infinite line to be respected in its whole extension, a knitting that leaves out as much as possible the use of the scissors.

Inserted in this perfect frame the knitting becomes a surface with features similar to those of a fabric, more of a flat space rather than a three-dimensional one, upon which the creative mind of the two designers can be engaged in countless experiments and creative techniques. From the creation of the machinery to the production of the fabric everything is studies and achieved inside the Maison, starting from the hanks of:

-wool,
-yak,
-mohair,
-polyamide, etc.

intertwined as desired according to the project of the ongoing season.

From the barbed, to the tweed and pinstripe, from the outerwear, dubbed to increase its thermal properties, to the lurex raffia, a material designed for travel, very light and with a strong visual impact, we are always talking of knitting. Lines that are inspired by the most international daily life, with a discreet visual impact, because each garment is created, in its excellence, in a long-lasting perspective, that will not tire and that will fall in perfect balance on the daily bases.

The inters of Michel and Cristina towards other artistic disciplines has pushed Boboutic, through the years, towards important collaborations, among which:

-Fanny & Alexander,

-Kinkaleri,

-Marco Mazzoni,

-Jacopo Miliani,

-Davide Savorani e Zapruder filmmakersgroup, etc

involved, from time to time, in the realization of works testimonial of the philosophy of each collection.

Present, by now, in the most prestigious boutiques all over the world, the made in Italy by Boboutic lacks only a long waited issue, capable of spreading the know-how and experience gained through years of very intense experimentation, creating awareness among the audience otherwise unaware of the constructive complexity that lies behind every garment.

When crossing the threshold of the 25th Henry Monnier rue, between Pigalle and Mont-Martre, a carpet of black sounding stones marks the sudden passage to another dimension.

There is no longer the Paris of the Marais and Fashion Week, there are no more runs in the subway, no longer the unprecedented modernity of electric scooters, but a relaxed, yet overwhelming, bohemien suggestion that takes over in Marc Le Bihan‘s and Jean François Mimilla boutique/showroom.

And there we have the furnishings, the tables full of bijoux, rings, necklaces, the lights, accomplices of strenuous plays of shadows that amplify the extremely wide range of the collection, displayed in order of color, fabric and shape. Everything mingles with the items of the historical archive of Marc Le Bihan, a designer who is closely tied to his creative path and who has remained coherent over time.

His work is carried out in constant continuity with the performances of the early years, starting from the nineties when he was fascinated by the language of the great Japanese designers and the first Margiela. We need a lot of attention to distinguish the novelties within the dense presentation, the catalog remains continuous, it expands from season to season and every new outfit can request to be completed with pieces from the archive.

The languid poetic silhouette that emphasizes and brings up the shoulders and hips, together with the recurrent tulle, a magnificent tribute to Degas’ sensual dancers, mixes with its opposite and becomes harsh, with raw cut finishes, with the presence of black, disassembled and reassembled on fabrics with a much stronger character, accentuated by the washes that wrinkles the initial composure. The research is concentrated on the cultural evocations of the early twentieth century, from tait shapes, to antiqued jacquard fabrics, to deliberately excessive lengths and drapes. Everything comes together to outline a femininity on the border between two souls, an elegant haute couture one and the other shabby, at the limit of decadence.

The world of Marc Le Bihan is melancholy, it revives memories repressed by the speed of time and technological isolation, bringing back the intensity of an era still full of relationships and passionate conversations, accompanied by a good wine and the joie de vivre!

Come with us in the atmosphere of the Paris showroom as usual with our video…

Take a look online!

New insights around the Issey Miyake Resort, a line of the Issey Miyake Maison that, first of all, launches the debut of the new Winter Season. Presented during the Paris Fashion Week for the 2019 summer, therefore with an abundant year ahead of its release in the stores, the collection always offers a few, nonetheless extraordinary, examples of the textile and formal art of the Miyake Design Studio. From steam stretch to tone-on-tone textures, polyester fiber reveals all its artistic and practical potential.

The coils of clothes, sweaters and jackets take on poetic directions, diagonal lines intersect with circular and undulating motifs, they escape from the usual two-dimensionality of the fabrics and pursue, reinforcing each other, the innumerable chromatic components. The ability to manipulate so many compositional techniques, without ever degenerating into decorative drifts, reveals an inexhaustible creative exuberance together with a very rare understanding of the most prominent requirements of a special dress: to not oppress!

The exceptional nature of these garments lies in presenting themselves as works of great scenographic momentum, but, at the same time, of incredible lightness and elasticity. When worn their aesthetic charge – able to distort ones self perception – does not afflict the movement limiting it within a coercive structure, as often happens with clothes for big occasions, but on the contrary, it gives an unprecedented freedom, generating a perception of immediate ease and naturalness.

Even in less theatrical expressions, the focus is always on avoiding obviousness, constraints, both of movement and maintenance (practically everything can be washed in a washing machine), but more than anything and more than any other company, the challenge of the Maison Miyake is in the constant solicitation for the most fulfilling of feelings: joy.

The joy of seeing oneself renewed by a change of clothes, illuminated by carefully dosed colors and strategic silhouettes, capable of enhancing the strengths and disguising the weaknesses, the joy of seeing oneself, suddenly and radically, protagonists of a stateless and international contemporaneity.

As always, an opportunity to appreciate the discovery is to accompany you into his show-room in Paris…

Find the New Pre-Collection online

Fascinated by the sound and the protagonists of the famous Platonic dialogue, the young designer Zhuzhu, baptizes his own experience characterizing it immediately with a cultured and sophisticated aura, confirmed by the extraordinary care with which he presents his collections. Graduated from SiChuan Fine Arts Institution and then trained at the London Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Zhuzhu continued his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium and in 2014 in Hangzhou, China, founded Phaedo Studios. A path of cultural internalization that is enriched and intensified by the relationships with representatives of the world of art, design and fashion, areas that the young designer does not separate, developing them instead as coordinates of his own artistic dimension. In 2017 he is in fact a guest of the Triennale di Milano where he encounters the artist and collector Axel Vervoordt with whom he will develop an assiduously collaborations cultivated by that wabi-sabi spirit that unites the two personalities.

In the very accurate stands of the Parisian showroom the silk, with a suggestive abundance of tones and shapes, is the protagonist and around this precious fiber a story takes shape, a story that concentrates on what is observed and that goes far beyond here and now. The astonishment, in the face of the enthralling nuances expressed by the hanging garments, starts a soft narrative that reveals the long and complex experiments in painting the fabrics.

The process is natural, hand-made in tanks containing: fruit, seaweed, earth, coffee. The color density is given by exposure to the sun which usually lasts 2 months. The more the garments are exposed to the sun the greater is the intensity of the color, therefore they are tinged, then left to dry and then tinged again and left in the sun, until the desired note is reached.

For this reason each garment is unique and can vary with use, changing shades when in contact with the skin and the air.

The fabrics are confusing, the cotton looks like silk, the silk seems leather, the burned paper gives a chromatic continuum that, like on a musical score, harmonizes the whole collection, highly crafted and strongly characterized by sartorial knowledge of ancient Chinese tradition.

Phaedo’s poetics finds breath in the silhouettes, an alternation of empty and full, of weights and lengths that expands and amplifies a femininity which is solemn and ethereal, resolute and diaphanous, in a stunning and poignant flow, between East and West, furrowing unexplored territories that, probably, are still emerging thanks to cultural influences and completely new and globalized visual syntheses.

As always, an opportunity to appreciate the discovery is to accompany you into his show-room in Paris…

This is the first solo exhibition in its home town for Nicola Bortoletto, a young artist from Padua, class 1997.  An episode of dialogue between distant and, at the same time, close expressive experiences: on one hand the artistic manipulation of materials recovered from mainly construction contexts, such as tarred rubber and bitumen, on the other the particular sensitivity of IVO MILAN in identifying poetic languages within the so-called fashion system.

We encounter two different ways of shifting the focus from their instrumental or commercial origins to more visionary and aesthetic matrices, together, in the same space of the shop situated in via Santa Lucia 73, until next 10 June. A felt selection of artwork were one can observe how mater, in the abstract form chosen by the artist, also lends itself to existentialist analyzes and metaphors.

Part of the exhibition is a film made of moments, sequences of the artist’s creative process, and a graphic work, portrayed as a photographic book, which investigates the research and the creative process in his workplace.

The fulcrum of Bortoletto’s experience is the elaboration of the elements as the foundation of the artistic work, as well as the naturalness of the used materials. In an age strongly characterized by the physical dematerialization of the work of art, the sculptor has in fact elaborated a language able to tell the strong relationship between the transience of time, the human being and the matter.

His sculptures appear as assemblages and actions of repositioning, works of art in which the material entity becomes a preponderant element, together with the desire to magnify the poor material of everyday use, without any figurative purpose. They appear as primitive and primordial works, which invite to be discovered by the spectator, an exclusive and personal interpreter of every stratification, furrow and scratch revealed by the material.

Remembering, once again, that until June 10th it will be possible to visit the exhibition at the IVO MILAN store in Via Santa Lucia, 73, in the centre of Padua, we leave you with a brief photo reportage of the inauguration of Friday May 10^th…

Find the Spring/Summer Collection 2019