Highlighted Post | IVO MILAN - Radical Fashion Blog

In the mood for Shu!

By: Soili Milan

14-05-2021

Abbigliamento, Clothing, Design, Fashion

Shu Moriyama coat

We have already had the opportunity to meet Shu Moriyama before, and those who visited our store in Padua in the last years could know his work, his textile and styling know-how originating from his experience at the unique ateliers of Yohji Yamamoto, whom he cooperated with before launching his own collection, under his own name.

As a generous participant in this transitioning moment in our working experience, Shu shows us his S/S 2021 suggestions.

With a typical Japanese approach, the horizon from which he gets his own inspiration is far away from the influences of western fashion, more focused on commercial inputs and linked to seasonal trends bringing to fast obsolescence. Shu’s view melts with trees, flowers and fruits, in an effort of abstraction which gives origin to the pleats of his comfortable crinkled fabrics, with small dots recalling petals, some times tone on tone, some others more showy.

The wide spaces of Normandy, his land of adoption, are the background where his delicate clothes take form, designed with hidden elegance, more to put people at ease than to surprise in an impressive way. Poetry is not showed off, but it’s outlined with soft tones in fabric shades, in the embrace of shawl collars, in drop sleeves usually narrower at the bottom, in the chance of wearing many coats upside down, changing the final look.

Dresses, jackets, coats, skirts, and trousers, are all designed with comfort and pragmatism in mind, thanks to the elasticity of a polyester that keeps the crinkled effect in time and warrants excellent fit performance, and, more simply, to very easy maintenance, since they can be washed in washing machine with no ironing.

An alternative – less explicit and identifiable – to the more popular plated fabric of Issey Miyake, with a more reserved and calm accent, the one of Shu Moriyama, a visionary artisan to the utmost extremes for France and fashion.

Find the collection on our website!

Many thanks to Shu Moriyama for pictures and drawings and to Sari for the photograph shooting.

BOBOUTIC Fall/Winter 2019-’20

By: Soili Milan

16-11-2019

Abbigliamento, Art, Clothing, Fashion

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.

MARC LE BIHAN | Fall/Winter 2019-’20

By: Soili Milan

25-10-2019

Abbigliamento, Art, Clothing, Fashion

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!

Issey Miyake Resort F/W 2019-2020

By: Soili Milan

24-08-2019

Abbigliamento, Art, Clothing, Fashion

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

PHAÉDO | Spring/Summer 2019

By: Soili Milan

25-05-2019

Abbigliamento, Art, Clothing, Fashion

A respectable new entry for this season, Phaedo Studios, a brand of Chinese origin, whose name is inspired by a Plato work, Phaedo (in ancient Greek Φαίδων, Phàidō).

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.