The Polimoda Fashion Show 2015 highlighted 20 collections by design graduates at its Villa Favard headquarters here on Tuesday. The Florentine fashion school’s emerging talents curated eight expressive outfits to showcase design skills learned over three-year programs led by head of design department, Patrick De Muynck.
Across three Florence facilities, the 29-year-old Polimoda International Institute of Fashion Design & Marketing is overseen by president Ferruccio Ferragamo and dean Linda Loppa, who believes that the institute’s most successful fashion students merge a healthy mix of creativity and management. “The creative individual needs to study the fashion business and how they should present themselves and integrate into the company, and the business individual needs to study the DNA of their designers,” she said.
The 20 designers from eight countries presented high-tech materials, meticulous craftsmanship and dynamic palettes across 11 women’s wear and nine men’s wear collections that ranged from folkloric fantasies to conceptual manifestos. Designers cited inspiration from sources such as writers Jules Verne and F. Scott Fitzgerald; films such as Luchino Visconti’s “Conversation Piece” and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “L’enfer”; German carpet designer Jan Kath; and American nun, Sister Charlotte Wells. Standout collections included Matilde Gennari’s gold, black and green embroidery over rubber to evoke poet John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” verse, and Anzhelika Balaeva’s transparent plastic-and-metallic sheen designs crafted in exaggerated forms, based on Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Solaris.”
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