It’s been 10 years since Giuseppe Di Morabito presented his first collection, inside a Milan gypsotheque. “Franca Sozzani was there,” he recalled, “I remember it vividly.” Yesterday, those images returned at Napoleon’s neoclassical Palazzina Appiani, at Milan’s Arena Civica. Instead of a runway, Di Morabito staged an intimate dinner followed by a masquerade ball with a white dress code. “I looked at the calendar and saw it was Carnival time, so I thought: why not stage a ball? I felt the desire to turn this winter fashion week moment into something more symbolic.,” he said. Thus, friends and family filled the long tables topped with candelabras and statue casts, many wearing the brand’s archive pieces.
The real show, however, was unfolding on the illuminated staircase overlooking the Arena, where the collection, The Inner Venus, appeared immobilized, petrified. “We studied all the installations as if they were contemporary relics,” Di Morabito explained. Each look had been resin-coated, frozen mid-gesture, as if struck by a contemporary Medusa. “The concept is the fragment,” he added, “In sculpture there’s Canova’s perfection, but then there’s the broken torso, mutilated, even more emotional.”
The material work was among his most intricate to date: Silk tubular elements entirely hand-stitched and interlaced formed anatomical surfaces; gauzed lace was embroidered with pearls and wool spheres for density; stabilized real hydrangeas were embedded onto trousers; feathered collars hovered between protection and ornament, and leather orchids rested on peplum skirts. A new gold look marked the first time the metal has entered as a full garment rather than accessory. “These techniques are all new, it’s an exercise in pushing the boundaries,” he explained.
The tension between masculine rigor and hyper-feminine construction remained central: tailored blazers cut with severity offset organza dresses threaded with suspended floral stems. A leather treatment mimicked denim aging, another first-timer for the brand. Although 10 years have passed since the gypsotheque, the obsession was the same: the body as sculpture, memory, and fragment. The difference, though, was in scale and confidence.