In the context of Pitti W, a fair-event for women’s fashion from 11 to 14 January, fashion institute Polimoda staged an ambitious project in Firenze. They created a video-photography exhibition of fashion concepts and creations evocatively entitled “Totem, reflections on the future of fashion”. The exhibition offers an intriguing preview of the fashion of the future, generated by the creativity and talent of the Polimoda students in the Fashion Design and Fashion Marketing departments. Fabian of Base Brussels was there and had the chance to visit this amazing installation!

“On a prestigious stage such as that of Pitti W,” comments Linda Loppa, Director of Polimoda, “we have proposed an innovative manner of presenting fashion through a visual experience which is triggered by the training activities currently carried out by Polimoda. The exhibition wants to trace out the lines of fashion development, by identifying and suggesting contaminations, evolutions and new prospects. The space in which we have set up the fashion totems is conceived as a site of debate where, through Polimoda, an ever-changing range of subjects is brought up for discussion, via a mix of proposals and appraisals of what fashion is today and where it might go in the future. We styled the totems by combining different objects and creations developed by our students, in a contamination of mood and creativity which together can deliver a key to the interpretation of the future fashion evolutions.”

Creativity and meditations on the future are pivotal in the video projects that complete the Polimoda installation. Eight monitors bring the whole to life by illustrating the same number of vantage points on the fashion world, through design and communication. “Totem: Reflections on the Future of Fashion”, “Mist Blow”, “Shoes…Bags…Shoes”, “Master Design Advanced”, “The Best of: Polimoda Fashion Show 2010”, “Polimoda Photo Gallery” are the videos produced using the images and creations of the Design department.
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In the second part of the exhibition, the students of the Marketing Communication course present “Urban Fabric: A different language of Fashion Marketing Communication”. The video, part of a larger project on alternative languages for communication in the fashion world, experiments with famous architectural structures and prestigious monuments which, like living bodies, slough off their habitual surfaces and literally change their skin, adorning themselves in the most famous and recognizable fabrics. The Guggenheim museum of Bilbao designed by Frank Gehry is swathed in denim, while the Palazzo della Civiltà in Rome created by Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Bruno La Padula and Mario Romano is clothed in the tricot that made Missoni famous, in a graphic experiment that focuses attention on the increasingly biomorphic features of contemporary architecture.

“Taken as a whole, the projects that we have proposed within Pitti W,” concludes Linda Loppa, represent above all an innovative showcase to present the work of our students, original and creative both in the sphere of design and in that of visual communication. In effect what is on show here are the dual cores of Polimoda, design and marketing, reflecting the two key and complementary components of the fashion system, for which our institute is in a position to offer a visionary training. It is these young people, the designers and the marketing and communication managers of tomorrow, that embody the real preview of the fashion of the future.”

Further details about the event are available on the website www.polimodamag.com: a new space where teachers, students and former students of the institute can make their voices heard, as well as a new way of talking about fashion.