Exhibitions and Festival
UNSTAGE: IED Milano fashion show with artist Scarlett Rouge
Date
27 September 2025
Time
12:15 PM - 13:15 PM
Fruition
In-person event
Beyond the runway at Milano Fashion Week: a collective, curatorial gesture from 13 IED fashion designers and the performance of artist Scarlett Rouge. At Galleria Lia Rumma on Sept 27th
On the occasion of Milan Fashion Week, we'll present UNSTAGE: a curatorial and performative gesture that invites us to deconstruct the runway in order to rewrite the language of fashion. No longer a showcase of individualities, but a collective act. Not a celebration of the author, but a shared exposure of the process.
IED UNSTAGE, THE CONCEPT
Following UNFOLD — an exhibition project that brought to light visions, narratives, and layers of design thinking — UNSTAGE represents the living moment of transformation: a deconstructed, walkable, museum-like fashion show where fashion becomes a moving art form, a thinking body, a sensitive space.
On and off stage there is no traditional runway, but rather a geography of gestures, sounds, garments, and bodies that intersect within a museal device. At the center is the work of 13 newly graduated IED Milan students who, through 50 looks, create a collective, unique, and immersive narrative curated by Umberto Sannino, Head of Fashion School.
“With UNSTAGE we take the fashion show beyond its conventions, rewriting its representative form. Not only catwalk, but fashion that becomes art through performance. Form becomes substance. The audience participates. Space is symbolic. UNSTAGE is both a political and aesthetic act” - Danilo Venturi, Director of IED Milan, comments.
IED UNSTAGE, LA PERFORMANCE DI SCARLETT ROUGE
The show opens in a suspended atmosphere with a live performance by artist Scarlett Rouge: in darkness, on the ground floor of the gallery, a tangible sign of beginning and immersion. The audience remains seated, but the experience is differentiated: those on the ground floor witness an intense, intimate moment shaped by darkness; those on the upper level access a luminous space of openness and amplified vision.
The presence of a performative artist like Scarlett Rouge deepens the reflection on the artistic gesture and collective ceremony, while the sound curation builds an environment that guides, suspends, and subverts perception.
“I am excited to work with Umberto Sannino and the IED team to create this unique experience that reminds us that fashion is not just about the surface, or our Egos; inside the folds of fabric there are profound Souls longing to connect to others and weave together a truly beautiful and intricate community” Scarlett Rouge said.
“UNSTAGE is fashion that disobeys, dismantling the surface to reveal what lies beneath: the making, the thinking, the collaboration” Umberto Sannino said. Ultimately, it is a practice of liberation, where form is deconstructed and vision is multiplied.
ABOUT SCARLETT ROUGE
Currently living in Fontainebleau, Scarlett Rouge has always resided between California and France. Daughter of an artist—her father is the visionary designer Rick Owens, her mother the multifaceted artist Michèle Lamy—she has been able to distill from the family's creative verve her own original artistic expression, rich in spirituality.
She completed her BFA in Photography in 2002 at The California Institute of the Arts. After deciding it was too “sunless in the darkroom” she transitioned to painting, then completing her studio studies in installation art. Rouge’s interdisciplinary practice echoes her nomadic life, which has been influenced by mythos, geographical settings, and navigation be- tween cultures. A disciple of ‘art as spiritual therapy’ movement, she infuses her distinct playfulness across artistic expression. Utilizing symbolic language, she reconstructs archetypes to fit our present-day ethos in an effort to create an integrated framework that touches the secular nature of our modern souls.
As embodied in her sculpture Origine Oscura, 2012, an earth goddess is distorted by neglect and abuse. Rouge uses her character’s vagina dentata to comment on society’s overwhelming consumerism. Pulled by the threads of mysticism and the power of symbols, Rouge's art practice is a fusion of her love of storytelling and her interest in metaphysics. Inspired by the teachings of Jung, Campbell, and Starhawk; Rouge views her artistic function as a form of sorcière artiste where her creations act as therapeutic meditations for the psyche. Considering age-old inquiries such as “What happens between death and birth?” or “What is the impetus of meaning?”, she uses video artworks such as Magic Trauma Sprinkles, 2009, and Beyond the Walls of Eden, 2018, to propel the artist and social “outsider” to question the traditional ties that separate archaic and contemporary society. Whether using the Internet as a platform for her performance Sex, God, and Webcams, or in her self-styled ‘movable murals’ The Oxymorons fighting for Peace, 2013 and Indigenous Vs Disingenous, 2018, Rouge uses art as an anthropological discovery and a method to reflect upon political discourse.
In all her work, Rouge remains driven by an intuitive need to reconnect Spirit to Matter, by the growth of our collective human psyche, and a need to explore not only what things are made of, but also to uncover the invisible energy and the emotive drives that further existence. According to Scarlett vision Art can guide us to descend into and appreciate the darkness, and usher us back towards the awakening of light that shines at the end of the tunnel.
