Research — Tommaso Curatella

When we talk about avant-garde, it's natural to picture something extreme — a shape or an image that hits you immediately. My work starts from a different idea: that the most authentic form of avant-garde isn't an aesthetic, but a way of working.

Unlike artistic avant-garde, which historically set out to revolutionise the language of art and its relationship with society, avant-garde in fashion tends to live in the project and the process rather than in the final image. In the designers I look to, innovation isn't found in the shape of the garment itself, but in how it's conceived, built and made.

Three references

Paul Harnden

An English tailor working between London and Spain, Paul Harnden builds his practice on slow, handmade research, far removed from industrial rhythms and the logic of the fashion system.

Carol Christian Poell

An Austrian designer based in Milan, Carol Christian Poell pursues an extreme investigation of the body, constantly questioning the relationship between anatomy, garment construction and production process.

Maurizio Altieri — Carpe Diem

Through his Carpe Diem project, Maurizio Altieri works between Italy and Eastern Europe on a method built around single-piece patterns, meticulous craftsmanship and an almost obsessive attention to how things are actually made.

The recipe

From these three paths I borrowed not a style but a way of thinking about design: the recipe. Not a rigid formula to follow to the letter, but a sequence of steps that guides the work without confining it. Starting from the recipe as a design device, I identified a set of elements that define the construction method of the collection.

Historical costume as an open system

The research unfolds on two parallel levels: on one side, studying the methods of these designers; on the other, analysing the historical costume that had inspired them in turn. I focus on reworking that costume — trying to understand its original construction and then translating it onto a contemporary body, not to faithfully reproduce silhouettes from the past, but to extract their underlying principles and turn them into something new.

Costume, here, is not something frozen in time, nostalgic or purely referential, but an open system — something that can be taken apart, reinterpreted and rebuilt, while keeping intact its ability to keep changing.

Belgian, London and Japanese avant-gardes

The archival investigation looks at fashion's avant-garde, with particular attention to the season following the wave of hyper-minimalism, and to the Belgian, London and Japanese avant-gardes. These references inform a practice attentive to the ritual construction of the garment, distant from the logic of trends and closer to an idea of clothing as an object of thought.

The avant-garde I'm interested in doesn't live in the final appearance of the garment, but in how it's thought through, constructed and transformed — an attitude that treats the past not as an archive to preserve, but as living material, capable of generating new forms and new readings of the present.