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Far from being a newcomer to the world of design, Ziggy Chen, the pseudonym of Chen Xiang, launched his men’s fashion label in Shanghai in 2012. This followed years of experience in teaching textile design and leading Decoster Concept, an avant-garde brand targeted at the local Chinese market.

His success and international recognition enabled him to introduce a women’s fashion line in 2019.

With a distinct Eastern skill set, Ziggy seamlessly merges elements from the vast traditional heritage of his homeland with the influences and rhythms of the Western world. This syncretism encompasses the importation of the finest European and Japanese textiles, their reassembly using ancient local manufacturing techniques, and stylistic interpretations continually influenced by the world of visual arts, the many countries he has visited, and a particular emphasis on the simple and industrious daily life.

Ziggy Chen fuses these diverse influences and knowledge while guided by a concept of comfort and a pronounced preference for natural fibers, including silk, cotton, wool, and cashmere. His artistic vision incorporates asymmetries and decorative details, skillfully harmonized through his tailoring expertise and the chromatic sensitivity derived from the selected fibers for each creation.

 

Credits:

Stylist: Sari Milan
Photography: Cezara Schiopu
Text: Soili Milan

Collaborations: Centro Ottico – Gruppo GREEN VISION

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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

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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!


 

 

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While the summer insists on its hottest manifestations, longing for holiday destinations, regenerating rhythms and locations, we return together to Sari with some outdoor shots.

An opportunity to observe, from other perspectives, lights and combinations the proposals of a catalog that is now close to welcoming the first autumn deliveries…Let’s go!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many thanks to GART for the location and to Andrea Rossi for the photos

 

Accessoires by: Shoto (shoes and bags), Zilla (bags), Chisaki (hats).

Clothing by: Marc Le BihanAlbum di FamigliaDaniela GregisJunya WatanabeForme d’ExpressionShu MoriyamaMaria Calderara

 

 



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Early October 2021, it’s still hot during an atypical Paris Fashion Week, with few foreign presences, fashion shows, and showrooms (effects of the pandemic and all relevant restrictions).

After almost two years of absence from the Ville Lumière, with great expectations, we plunge into the neighbourhood hosting Marc Le Bihan‘s space, in the 13th Arrondissement, near Place d’Italie. We don’t really know this area well and it seems not to be so familiar to the fashion circuits. So it’s a surprise, for us, to walk on quiet little streets up to the small hill called Butte-aux-Cailles. Step by step, we get close to rhythms that are completely different from those left only few subway stops before, in the far more animated Marais. We feel the reassuring silence of popular areas on days off and the diffuse white of the houses, like a sunny village on remote Greek islands, interrupted by recurring colourful murals. Bewildered by the sudden change of perspective, almost holiday-like, we arrive, with perfect punctuality, at our appointment.

A blue-stained door opens to welcome us into the French designer’s workshop, located right next door to his home. This is where he has been moving with his showroom for the past few seasons. Far more spacious than in the store in the Pigalle area, it spreads out behind a magnificent green indoor patio, carefully set up to welcome friends and clients with the sincere warmth that distinguishes his mild and generous attitude. An ability to put everyone at ease that involves every single cell, leading it to a zone of comfort and well-being. The meeting is almost touching, after so long and with all the changes faced. We are brought back into the working mood, only after relaxed and affectionate greetings, seasoned with ironic lightness, thus studying and mentally composing the choice of a vast collection, spread in several rooms with soft lights.

A path inside a poetics further evolved from last seasons, where Haute Couture harmonizes with the archive (always present) and novelties with a more contemporary taste.

We have already extensively presented it in the past (for an in-depth look, see here) and Marc Le Bihan manages to develop the same idea of femininity with extreme consistency and creativity, without giving in to the drift of ‘everything returns’ with dreaded and boring redundancies. Although he has now been in this sector for several years, in his 2022 spring/summer collection a tension toward experimentation both, formal and textile, is evident. From the ‘writings’ with moving and contrasting under-stitching that emerge from complex dyeing of silk, daring experiments that halve the size of the starting fabric, to textile patchworks that with the constant use of the idea of an unfinished work – an open work – generate garments with ambivalent categories. Even when you wear it, partially jacket and partially shirt, able of placing themselves, depending on their combination, in very elegant settings or in more informal everyday contexts.

 

And the presence of tulle, so recurrent in his path, is elaborated within a range of colours that, in impalpable overlays, sketch nuances of touching poetry. A certain latent romanticism, is always included thanks to compositions with more composed and severe lines, with raw-cut profiles and complex tailoring constructions or rough ruffles in silk and elastane.

The assortment is complex, not easy to subtract elements from a symphony in which everything is interconnected, but, in the end, re-emerging from an almost hypnotic enchantment, you find yourself in a personal selection that Marc observes, with curiosity and satisfaction, struck himself by the inexhaustible interpretative possibilities of his proposals.

Meanwhile evening has fallen, with the mottled sound offered by a scratching needle the record spinning, we return to the pleasure of interminable tales and long-awaited laughter…

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