Telling stories about style and its evolution within society is the main task for a Fashion Stylist. An interesting challenge that requires instinct, ability to look at a bigger picture, combined with method and understanding of the mechanisms regulating this market. It isn’t just about illustrating clothes and collections. It’s a matter of reading between the lines, grasping the concepts hidden behind the works of fashion houses. The most important thing is to go beyond a simple analysis, blending good taste and ability in order to make words bend to sensations.
The 0212 generation: a real creative resistance
Venezuela is an eternal contrast of cultures, thoughts, behaviour and landscapes. Valeria Romano, Fashion Stylist student at IED Milano, spent the most of her life in Caracas, the city of chaos, having the opportunity to learn that life is frenetic and short, creativity has no limits and from crisis appear opportunities. She realized that also in Venezuela there are countercultures, but the lack of information through media keeps them anonymous. With this project, Valeria aims at giving a personal contribution to her country sharing its creative talents. It has been made during times of crisis, dictatorship and protests, and it shows the 0212 Generation, a group of young admirable, brave and talented people that deserve an open window to the rest of the world.
Between Power and Delicacy
Stylists often use dance as storytelling, because it can be stronger in raising emotions than traditional fashion shows. This project aims at showing the “raw beauty” of dancers through this ballerina, whose pulsating energy expresses both strength and delicacy at the same time. For the photo shooting IED Firenze the students of the second year in Fashion Stylist and Communication chose a marble’s factory, in order to show the perfect mesh between dresses revealing the body’s silhouette and the ancestral aesthetics of minerals, linked to magic and mistery.
Marble is a stone characterized by everlasting hardness and elegance, but it doesn’t have much value by itself: it takes a long time and hard work to become a masterpiece, just like dancers.
PROJECT IN COLLABORATION WITH ELIISS
The students in Fashion Stylist and Communication at IED Firenze developed a project for the launch of Eliiss, a company providing the elites bespoke luxury footwear, which has been produced by the most skilled Tuscan artisans, as well as an all-round artisan tourism experience.
After a careful analysis of the target and brand’s positioning, students developed a communication campaign according to the concept of reflection: what people see in the mirror is not just the real image but also a projection of their desires and a way to show what’s behind something.
Luca Smorgon, graduate student in Fashion Stylist at IED Milano, is Editor in Chief and Creative Director of Cactus, a publishing project focused on fashion, photography and the visual arts. With the belief that the imagery is the most suitable instrument to inspect contemporaneity, it deals with the visual culture making seriously fun of it. With no dividing sections and strict themes, contents are developed by the power of accordance and discordance, building up a path that is born to be tickling and bold. Fashion editorials, photography reports, illustrations and artworks are mixed and recombined in order to satisfy the critical sense of image-eaten readers.
IED and Linsday Kemp 4 Pitti Uomo 92
In occasion of Pitti 92nd edition, one of the most important fashion festival at international level, IED presented a collaboration with an international artist who has left an indelible mark on contemporary art and culture: Lindsay Kemp. The workshop involved 40 IED students from 9 different fashion and design branches, who created the costumes for the event using fabrics and products coming from companies located in Como and Tuscany. In particular, Argenti silk-makers from Como – a historic name in Italy’s textile industry that annually produces and sells worldwide about 3.5 million metres of fabric for women’s clothing – printed a series of Lindsay Kemp’s drawings on duchesse silk. The students involved in costumes’ creation also wore them during a final performance featuring Kemp himself as main character.
Song Qiao Yu, student of the Three-year course in Fashion Stylist, created a magazine called Whatsface, a hybrid between Whatsapp and Facebook. She took inspiration from the Chinese theory of Shanzhai, the art of copying. Leafing through the pages is it possible to understand that the concepts of copy and re-elaboration are very close. Inside Whatsface there are fake brands presented near to editorials and the layout make everything look like a copy of a real magazine.
Discrezione – Photographic Project
Discrezione, meaning discretion, is a photographic project originating from the inner necessity to make order in a society that seems having pushed away the good manners and elegance that characterised the past. Manuel Sinopoli, Fashion Stylist at IED Milano, started from a bibliographic research on classic literature and then moved to the analysis of contemporary scenarios. His work points out how self-expression prevails, but there is a specific way of expression that preserves a shade of past good manners: the modest.
Manule Sinopoli won the Milano Moda Graduate, a fashion show featuring the best fashion schools, for the best styling project. Read the article on Vogue.