Inspired by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written during the poet’s psychiatric confinement, Giuseppe Di Morabito imagined his collection as a constellation of fragments: “I was struck by how that kind of beauty came from a place of deep crisis,” he said. “It made me think of something that can be beautiful even when you’re not able to explain it.” The lookbook merged opposing forces: AI-generated images were juxtaposed with analogue photographs he took on his Leica. “I wanted to break the artificiality,” the designer said. “Clothes and memories are very real: in the photos there are Namibia, Stromboli, Botswana, Ibiza, Sri Lanka, for instance.”
This duality was echoed in the wardrobe Di Morabito designed: “There’s a romanticism to it, but also distance. That tension is what I’m interested in,” he said. Capes made of pinstriped jacquard or lace bonded with plastic alternated with trenches in python-printed leather and shearlings stamped with animal motifs, introducing new material explorations. Silhouettes were expansive but sharp, with military closings and fitted waists, as the brand has accustomed us to: “The starting point is always menswear, but then I soften it for the modern woman, although I’m starting to enjoy seeing men wearing these clothes too,” said the designer.
The collection exuded both protection and seduction, with jersey corsets, feather-trimmed cloaks, and short coats with bold front pockets. Accessories extended the metaphor thanks to rhinestoned hairpins that transformed into fasteners, silk organza flowers that bloomed from collars and on heels, organic-shaped piercings that unscrewed into functional closures, and his signature rose brooch made a return. “Nothing is decorative for the sake of it,” the designer mentioned. “Every piece is a memory or a tool to hold onto something.” The color palette remained restrained, with earthy neutrals punctuated by petrol, lilac and pale blue.
The final image of the collection—a woman in a voluminous protective cape, seducing with bare legs—was Di Morabito’s AI rendition of the Cumaean Sibyl: “She’s condemned to eternity, but she carries the memory of history on her body. For me, that’s what clothes do too,” he explained. There’s no promise of resolution in his storytelling, it’s about rediscovering who we have become, not who we once were. The title itself read like a verse: “Ci fermammo sotto il colonnato e procedemmo verso il sole,” a sentence that, with everything happening around us, carries nothing definitive, yet everything moves within it.
