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.

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

Always present in the history of the Maison, the Issey Miyake Resort, once called Fête, is presented much in advance compared to the concerning season. Included in fact in the pre-collections calendar, the line breaks that canonical waiting period between the end of one season and the beginning of another, animating the store life with suggestive promises about the time to come.

Projected on the imminent Spring/Summer Collection, the new arrivals are carrying the creative inspirations of the artistic director Yoshiyuki Miyamae, specifically fascinated by the work of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe during her stay in New Mexico.

Georgia O’Keeffe, From the Lake No.1, 1924, Oil on canvas, Nathan Emory Coffin

Collection of the Des Moines Arts Center

The prints, laid out on the complex diagonal folds of the tulip shaped dresses, on the circular tops or on the vertical wavy ones of the dubbed shirts, are real pictorial samples, evocations of the abstract landscape paintings of the American painter. In the elaboration offered by the Maison, the color follows with extreme complicity the soft and harmonious textile texture of the non-deformable polyester, which was spun in vaguely floral shapes or in solid color lines with the visual simplicity of a freshly rippled sea. The constant textile experiments, hallmark of the Japanese company, are also expressed in the particular cotton denim, where the processing, typical of jeans, is transformed into continuous solid color canvas, without intermediary stitching.

Even for a smaller collection like Resort, Issey Miyake challenges the inattentive look, invites it to linger, to follow the waves obtained from the steam processes of the exclusive textile technologies, to translate the lightness of shapes and colors into amazement and wonder for garments with an innate vocation to be incomparable companions of travel!

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

Find online the Issey Miyake Resort Collection

Among the uninitiated, even today the name of the most futuristic Maison of the prêt-à-porter is associated with a fragrance, Eau d’Issey.

An unexplained and paradoxical binomial if we enter in the huge and hyper-technological textile production which, for nearly half a century, has identified the Issey Miyake brand. Not only the company is the owner of several other brands, including Pleats Please, BaoBao, Cauliflower, 1 3 2.5, etc., but mostly remains in the spotlight of the largest contemporary art museums and in many of the most prestigious magazines and publications of art, architecture and design.

The reasons for such authoritative and frequent awards are undoubtedly in the extension of the boundaries that normally establishes the matter of the work, the fabric, turning it into plastic fiber par excellence, on which to intervene with all the complexity and ideational freedom of creating, responding also to very simple starting questions: agility of movement, comfort and of course, aesthetics.

If the expression that best frames the Miyake Design Studio work, a laboratory that concentrates engineering and informatics geniality, is the plissé, today you must dig into its various realizations, in its constant connection between form and color. On one side we have the ‘steam-stretch’ method that, simplifying, uses steam heat to emphasis the fold, often recognizable by spiral swirls that cover the garment, whether it is a dress, jacket or shirt. On the other hand, we have the last and most complex ‘baked stretch’ method, where the object of formal definition of the finished object occurs through an ingenious combination of pigments laid on the polyester, entering then in special ovens, following the three-dimensional development of the final article through an yeasting phenomenon.

The synthesis of these experiments can seem easy to understand if one only ignores that, in both cases, the teams work on garments that have already been manufactured and which will be in their final and definitive shape after undergoing the textile treatment.

The idea that the clothing can become artistic occasions to all intents and purposes and its demonstration in the abstractions concretized in Issey Miyake products, explain the interest of the specialized press towards the Maison, the honor of being exhibited in major contemporary art galleries and, probably, the opposite unpreparedness of the general public, alien to all that the media does not strongly advertise to make it simple and recognizable.

The images below show examples of both steam stretch and baked stretch methods. Both, having as basic material the polyester, are suitable to be worn both in winter and in summer, in the first case by layering, in the second, of course, maintaining the starting nudity.

But you can observe other poetic manifestations of the Maison in the meshes, with the cosmos pattern hand-dyed and then transferred to the silk-effect plissé, or in the extraordinary cotton and polyester fresco overcoat, where the smooth canvas meets in continuity the elastic folds of the pleated sides, that have the purpose of giving greater movement of the torso and arms.

The weak differentiation between autumn/winter and spring/summer is a further demonstration of the extreme functionality and usability of this clothing, thought-out to solve the most common problems: being on the road, in different weather conditions; the ease in cleaning; the impossibility of ironing; the long use in one day, punctuated from the daily routine in the morning to the evening times of greater social exchange.

Find online the Issey Miyake Collection on our website:

http://www.ivomilan.com/en/Tutte_le_collezioni-0/All-0/ISSEY_MIYAKE-47/e-shop.htm

It’s Norway the homeland of a brand that, even in its name, reveals without surprises its undoubted roots: Norwegian Rain!

An unisex product, which in the apparent classicism of the forms combines basic features for both cold and rainy climates. The canvases, strictly made of recycled Japanese polyester, are simulating the typical texture of traditional materials, such as wool gabardine, and do not reveal highly sophisticated and modern properties, such as the inner diaphragm, which guarantees to each raincoat to be both breathable and waterproof. The sealed seams prevent the water from intruding into the fearsome joints, allowing a peaceful freedom, regardless the worst downpours.

It lies precisely in this discrete translation of the high-tech garment, usually characterized by colored zippers or improbable reflective graphics and relegated to the most technical sportswear sector, in an elegant outwear, the most fascinating aspect of this Norwegian reality.

Is the modernity of a northern European language sensitive to aesthetics, grateful to the Japanese formal knowledge which is easily traced in the ongoing article, the Raincho, a garment halfway between the cape and the development of the kimono. Contribute to the complexity of the calm lines, details such as generous interior pockets, with the purpose of sheltering the vulnerable accessories, from wallets to phones, adjustable caps in amplitude with composed webbing and buttons, small panels that can replace bulky scarves, concealed zip pockets, always useful to not soak the necessary and in case you want to give up the use of the bag.

Norwegian Rain faces the everyday life with real prospects, but also with an original determination to integrate with the most complex and creative proposals of the great contemporary designers!

Wide Norwegian Rain waterproof coat with the shape of a cape in recycled polyester cloth, lined in viscose and polyester cloth

Hip-lenght A punto B sweater in cashmere cloth

Wide lined Comme des Garçons skirt in polyester matelassè with floral tapestry

Mascha ‘classic Trippen’ ankle boot in cowhide leather

Altalen hat in felt 100% lapin

Knee-lenght Norwegian Rain waterproof coat in recycled cloth lined in viscose and polyester cloth

Long and wide Boboutic cardigan in polyamide and extra fine merinos wool cloth worked with irregular knots

Classic Comme des Garçons man shirt in cotton poplin

Classic Comme des Garçons – Comme des Garçons man trousers in wool gabardine, cupro lined

Dippy Trippen Shoe in smooth cowhide leather

Knee-lenght Norwegian Rain waterproof coat in recycled polyester cloth, lined in viscose and polyester cloth

Zucca longuette dress in stretch, nylon and alpaca

Mascha ‘classic Trippen’ ankle boot in cowhide leather

For several years now Rei Kawakubo, in Comme des Garçons art, has exclusively dedicated to clues, atmospheres and evocation her own representation of the ongoing collection. Emancipated of any kind of obligation towards the expectations of the global audience, the Japanese designer delights with her exhibitions that are closer to the art world rather than the sector of belonging.  The runway is not dedicated to garments but to textile provocations, architectonic structures that surround the sacrificed bodies of models lend to carry oversized sculptures, deliberately cumbersome and disproportionate compared to the available space.

Impossible not to ask yourself why or what is the plausible message content in this artistic drift. Maybe a self-granted freedom of expression, against the monotonous limits forced by the reality of the female body, or a subtle provocation versus a star-system hat becomes increasingly uncritical and exhibitionist. Certainly the dialog has not the purpose of selling. The pared garments are indeed extraordinary pieces of contemporary art that belong in museums or wealthy collectors. The runway show is an idea, a suggestion of the inspiring motif of the season which will be found later translated and much wearable in the development in the show-room. For Autumn/Winter 2016-2017 we witness then poetic collage of antique fabrics, floral tapestries that catapult the public in the XVIII century, the Age of Enlightenment, the rematch of reason over ignorance and superstition.

Rei Kawakubo, however, is not nostalgic and well-mannered, the collage is held together by metal snap buttons, by cuts and raw seams, diagonals that fragment the decorative harmony of time, implying elements defined by herself  as Punk, in the most provocative meaning of the term.

Synthetic leather, studs, constant asymmetries  and details that can be observed in the motives sewed on skirts, in the curvatures of the nodal points of the joints, reinforced as if they were textile armatures. And extensions, adjustable connecting rings, a flexibility in disassembling and reassembling, a continuously adjustable area in lengths and a delicate balance between order and disorder. It is not said that we can return to the original reconstruction, that many the alternatives are. Modernity and tradition, they also alternate in the processing, the ancient Japanese knowing collaborates with the most daring experimentations of the multi-layerd polyester cloth with rayon, cupro and cotton panels, in an encounter that observes how the material determinants and imposes the final shape of the piece, whether is a jacket, skirt or coat.

Needless to assume how Rei Kawakubo, in preparing an original and personal temporal syncretism, punk and Enlightenment, thinks of women determined to stay in their own time with the vigor and exuberance of who has a critical and imaginative independency

Abirinzà, a sound more than a word, coming from the recurrent Earth cadences from which Daniela Gregis draw the inspiration for this spring/summer 2016, brings us important clues about the construction of a collection particularly full of ornamental patterns. The designer with this sound expression, probably invented, evokes the Sardinia, with its rooted and complex textile traditions, the extensive and expertise use of the loom, but also with its rich heritage of memories and nostalgia.

Abirinzà broods over the memories of hard work laying them down as poetic logos in unexpected positions, becoming systematic patchwork gussets, where two different possibilities combine themselves together: fragments saved from the past and reassembled in canvas next to a painting or more slow and difficult weaving, nets and gauzes, loom and crochet, embracing each other in perfect harmony.

The designer from Bergamo certifies in this way each piece, claiming an authenticity in the acrobatic vicissitudes of the paintbrush, that stains and gives new life to the linen nets, joint with their negatives in cotton poplin, because the process should be watched in its integrity, combining itself with the first work. The silks, in the slippery brightness of the crêpe de chine, become bright palettes of strained colour, in the more contrasting red-blue shades, but also in the less radical blue-pastel light blue and white. Or the vichy, quoted also in other seasons, widen themselves becoming definite squares with more and more large spaces, always treated with the washing to contain the cotton strict rigidity.

Abirinzà are the open doors of the memory silos, abirinzà are the surprises regenerate in the changes of thinking, abirinzà is the just started spring, abirinzà are the fresh starts and the promises of staying well.

Discover the full ‘Abirinzà’ collection on our online catalogue…

In the middle of the Paris Fashion Week for the next Autumn/Winter, it should be reported an other very important acknowledgement to the designer who most was able to connect clothing to concepts as innovation, experimentation and research. On Saturday 5^th March, at Issey Miyake boutique of Rue Royale in Paris, it will be launched an unpublished monograph dedicated by the Taschen publishing house to the Japanese master and to his prolific and hyper-technologic  Design Miyake Studio, established in the 1970.

A book that, not by chance, is launched almost simultaneously with the exhibition that will be opened on the 16^th of March at the National Art Center of Tokyo, completely installed to celebrate the professional history and the cultural contributions introduced by the researches carried out during these years by the researchers team involved in Issey Miyake’s ambitious creative project.

A long, extensive tale of the different steps that have characterised of the well-known polyester pleating, today present in the most prestigious shops in the world with the bran new version called “Baked Stretch”.

The chromatic and formal possibilities opened by this innovative material manufacturing, so called ‘baked’ as the pleats take their aspects after a heath exposition process very similar to the one of the bread rising, reveal the maturity and the extreme autonomy gained by the excellent collaborators chosen by Issey Miyake, among them it’s not possible to not mention the Maison creative director, the young Yoshiyuki Miyamae.

Click here to watch the video.

For those who would not have the chance to participate to the Paris event, nor to go directly to Tokyo, they can anyway lost themselves in the different pages describing the vast and futuristic repertoire of the Japanese designer. In fact the book is already available on the Taschen website and in the next months it would be distributed by the libraries and by the authorized boutiques.

Reversible top and skirt .

Reversible dress.

Junya Watanabe Spring/Summer 2016 runway details, Dazed & Confused dazeddigital.com.

(Dress and necklace coming soon.)

We always brought to light the Junya Watanabe’s peculiar interpretative ability in establishing, in the form of dress, the predominant stresses of our time. Post-modern, cyber-punk, tailor-philosopher of an age crossed by very fast transformations, where, from collection to collection, plastics and brand new materials, parts of abandoned industrial landscapes, occurred, to give shape to his personal metabolization and to his interpretation of the contemporaneity.

For the Spring/Summer 2016 the Rei Kawakubo-Comme des Garçons’ favourite, still produced by the Japanese Maison, welcomed his public in an emblematic space of pressing social themes, the Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration of Paris.

Il Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration of Paris on the cover of Junya Watanabe S/S 2016 lookbook.

An important clue, a sensitive container of the present restrictive instincts of a continent in a state of alert for the imposing migratory phenomenon of which is witness. A suggestion and also an invitation to change the prospective through which we perceive the present, from an emergency point of view to an enrichment one, the one that only a flow of people and therefore of culture could offer, as the time has been able to testify.

And it’s the most problematic and hot continent to be celebrated and evoked, translated by the usual Watanabe’s modern glance. African and electro sonorities go along on the runway with the vivaciousness of the colours and of the decorations: very warm reds or clear, intense blues; kaftans and zebra-stripes dresses, tunics and shirts, garments able to face the highest temperatures, but also able to prepare us for more relaxed and evolved holidays.

Constant asymmetries, elliptic constructions, experimental leopard spots on Japanese paper and complex fabric movements at the hem bring Africa and its chromatic, formal and symbolic qualities into the metropolitan and stateless circuits, where any traditional aesthetic contaminate and regenerate itself in peculiar, as independent, anthropological expressions.

Junya Watanabe long kaftan dress in light polyester canvas with horizontal stripes ‘décor’ style and aluminium bangles, wide crew-neck, wide flared sleeve, big metallic bangles on the cuffs detachable with laces and loops.

Junya Watanabe zebra-striped dress coming soon.

Junya Watanabe multi-layers rings necklace from the bigger to the smaller in shiny polyurethane and polyester imitation leather, it could be placed along the shoulders.

Photography from Junya Watanabe S/S 2016 lookbook.

Junya Watanabe asymmetric robe manteau dress in polyester organza with tone on tone small spots processing in Japanese paper, wide half-closed shirt neck, ¾ flared sleeve, buttons closure till the bottom, spiral construction.

Junya Watanabe 5 pockets jeans-like leggings in light stretch linen and polyurethane canvas, over-the-ankle length, zip and button closure, belt loops.

Massimo Giussani man shoe in cowhide leather entirely hand-painted with two colours one shading on the other, with laces and tongue with inner elastic band, leather sole painted in the same colours of the upper part.

Junya Watanabe long and wide shirt in light ramié canvas, raglan shoulder, long sleeve, sack line on the back and straight on the front.

A punto B long trousers in cotton poplin, elastic band and light curling at the band, welt vertical side pockets.

Massimo Giussani man shoe in cowhide leather entirely hand-painted with two colours one shading on the other, with laces and tongue with inner elastic band, leather sole painted in the same colours of the upper part.

Junya Watanabe long and wide shirt in light ramié canvas, raglan shoulder, long sleeve, sack line on the back and straight on the front.

A punto B wide linen canvas trousers, elastic band and light curling at the belt, welt vertical side pockets.

Classic’ Trippen ankle-length boot in soft elk leather with rounded tip, diagonal zip on the upper part, side zip closure, removable cork insole, rubber sole.

Junya Watanabe wide tunic in light ramié canvas, shirt neck with half-closed closure, flared line with stiff band, sack shape with central upside down V stitching and on the back at the bottom.

Junya Waatanabe 5 pockets jeans-like leggings in light stretch linen and polyurethane canvas, over-the-ankle length, zip and button closure, belt loops.

Massimo Giussani man shoe in cowhide leather entirely hand-painted with two colours one shading on the other, with laces and tongue with inner elastic band, leather sole painted in the same colours of the upper part.

Junya Watanabe wide tunic in light cotton canvas, crew-neck with back small button, flared line with stiff band, sack shape with side stitching towards the inside at the bottom.

Junya Waatanabe 5 pockets jeans-like leggings in light stretch linen and polyurethane canvas, over-the-ankle length, zip and button closure, belt loops.

Massimo Giussani man shoe in cowhide leather entirely hand-painted with two colours one shading on the other, with laces and tongue with inner elastic band, leather sole painted in the same colours of the upper part.