We are in Bergamo, but the journey begins far away, in Tokyo, the city of birth and education. Risa specializes at the prestigious Tama Art University in textile design, a path that leads her to the Miyake Design Studio, where she collaborates on the most artisanal of the lines, Haat.

The move to Italy follows, as often happens for Japanese talents, where she works until she is able to open her own tailor shop, creating only custom made garments, in the historic center of Bergamo. Finally, the big leap: a small production destined to a few select boutiques around the world, and a brand that carries her name: Risa Nakamura.

The designer brings into her workshop the great textile expertise of Japan and works with meticulous craftsmanship, ranging from chromatic research with plant-based dyes to the manual creation of buttons made from Calabrian briar wood, salvaging the remnants of this sturdy wood, typically used for smoking pipes. Her sensitivity extends even to the most overlooked materials, like buttons, sometimes barely visible because hidden by discreet flaps.

Japan influences the entire atmosphere of Risa’s work. Its presence is felt in every gesture: the selection of pure fibers, like Shetland wool, protected by its well-known roughness with natural linen linings; organic cotton suede, an alternative to the more casual sweatshirts; the crisp lightness of washed silk crepe de chine in her color palette. Japan twirls between strict or soft forms, inspired by workwear or the elements of the kimono, as well as in certain exercises typical of origami, where the development of geometry begins with small repeated connections, as seen in her patchwork skirt made of one hundred pieces, coming together to form a perfect circle.

Risa’s world, shared with her most loyal collaborator, her husband Emiliano, is dominated with a slow, patient, and sensitive aesthetic, dedicated to generating a surprising Zen-like balance: simplicity, care, and a laboriously engaging, existential gentleness.

To discover the new collection: ivomilan.com

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.