Exhibitions and Festival
Fashion, Visual Arts, and Clubbing at IED Offer Generational Snapshots of the Contemporary World
Date
30 June 2026 - 01 July 2026
Time
11:00 AM - 19:00 PM
Fruition
In-person event
IED Milan opens its end-of-year exhibition to the city, presenting a collective narrative of the perspectives, questions, desires, and uncertainties of its students.
What does it mean to be young in a present shaped by accelerated transformations, open questions, instability, and new opportunities? What does a garment reveal beneath the surface of its material? Can art and design offer “archipelagos of certainties in a sea of uncertainties”?
These questions lie at the heart of UNFOLD / Sudden Awareness of Now, an exhibition project where Fashion and Visual Arts dialogue to offer a plurality of perspectives on the contemporary world, giving shape to the tensions, desires, frailties, and possibilities that run through a generation.
The end-of-year exhibition is free and open to the public on Tuesday, June 30th and Wednesday, July 1st. The individual and choral narrative of approximately 60 thesis collections in Fashion Design intertwines with styling, moving images, sound, performance, and club culture into a single shared experience that captures the "here and now" of Generation Z, amidst its vulnerabilities and moments of enlightenment.
UNFOLD, FASHION EXHIBITION: BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE
Under the creative direction of Umberto Sannino, Head of Fashion School, the classrooms and corridors of the Fashion School transform into an exhibition space. Here, the 2025/2026 Fashion Design thesis collections are narrated individually through panels and the live voices of the graduating students. This narrative then becomes choral in the Theatre: visitors find themselves before a tableau of outfits from the collections—a comprehensive overview and a mosaic of looks to get lost in, made possible thanks to the support of Hans Boodt Mannequins, a global leader in the mannequin industry.
Completing the exhibition is Unqualified—a publication gathering curricular and extracurricular projects from the school’s various souls: Fashion Styling, Marketing, and Communication—and the fragrances developed in collaboration with the master perfumers at MANE by designers and stylists from the IED Milan and Barcelona campuses, serving as a further expression of the cross-disciplinary approach that defines IED education.
VISUAL ARTS, SUDDEN AWARENESS OF NOW: INSTALLATION, PERFORMANCE, CLUBBING
Dialoguing with this fashion narrative is the Sudden Awareness of Now, provided by the contribution of the School of Visual Arts, based on the concept created by Carlotta Cattaneo, Head of Visual Arts School.
The project takes shape through an immersive audiovisual installation set up on the Theatre stage (the same space where the outfit tableau unfolds), enriched by a program of live musical performances. On one hand, the external world reflects the complexity of the present through moving images, electronic rhythms, and percussive sounds, evoking masses, collective bodies, belongings, and shared movements. On the other hand, the internal world opens up a more intimate, suspended, and introspective space, where the individual emerges as a fragile, perceptive presence and a possible point of orientation within uncertainty.
Live interventions by Sound Design students add personal and courageous perspectives on the tension between certainty and uncertainty through ensembles that intertwine acoustic and electronic instruments, classical and experimental languages, compositional practices, and performance approaches.
The experience continues in the school’s underground spaces, transformed into a temporary club where DJ sets and performances become an integral part of the narrative. Here, club culture is not mere entertainment, but a tool for reading the present.
UNFOLD / Sudden Awareness of Now is thus the result of an encounter between different disciplines, languages, and sensibilities. Every work and every musical intervention acts as a potential "island of certainty"—an emotional and cultural geography through which students map out sounds, memories, belongings, and visions capable of guiding new forms of connection.
UNFOLD / Sudden Awareness of Now IED Milan – via Pompeo Leoni 3
Tuesday, June 30 - Wednesday, July 1, 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM. Free Admission.
Opening (by invitation): Tuesday, June 30 at 11:00 AM
Performances: June 30 at 11:00 AM - July 1 at 6:00 PM and 7:00 PM
DJ sets throughout the two-day event.
Where to find us
You may be interested in:
