ITS Arcademy Museum of Fashion Artwhich has recently opened its doors in the city, has the ambition to be the first Italian museum dedicated to contemporary fashion, with its sights set on young and up-and-coming designers, caught up in the phase where everything is experimentation and the only limit is sleep.
The new exhibition space opens with an exhibition specially curated by the fashion historian Olivier Saillard, “The First Exhibition, 20 Years of Evolution of Contemporary Fashion”, an unprecedented and endearing journey through the last twenty years of the most avant-garde fashion, until February 2024. The exhibition includes a hundred works, divided into thematic currents: expressionists, neofuturists, lyrical abstractions, art-brut, free figurations, self-portraits. The protagonists are the creations of Demna (Balenciaga Creative Director), matthieu blazy (Bottega Veneta), Justin Smith, Thomasine Barnekow, Richard Quinn AND Maiko Takeda, with his hat worn by Bjork. ITS Arcademy is also a vast and original collection of portfolios, clothing, accessories and photography that tell the story of the ITS competition dedicated to contemporary fashion: a vivid documentation of the creative energy captured in action, without commercial or other restrictions.
The new museum aims to stage, in a stable but dynamic way, the creative flow expressed by fashion design in recent years, both with a retrospective approach and by focusing attention on the most recent creative landscape, turning it into a source of knowledge and inspiration. for visitors, especially the youngest. The museum connects some of the best creative forces in the Trieste area on the border between fashion, design and art, and relies on the support of the most important local economic and financial institutions and realities, which have always believed in the culture of beauty and creativity. The rooms of the building from the end of the 19th century in which the museum is located have been redesigned according to ultra-modern exhibition parameters, in order to plastically express the connection between the past and the present of this Italian city that has a very important history and wants to look to the future with renewed artistic and business audacity.
Among the initiatives, the launch of ITS 2023 Contest: Born to create, which opened registrations from May 10. The new format provides for the first time a creative residency for the finalists within the framework of the ITS Arcademy, whose works will become part of the museum’s collection. Entries will close on September 10, 2023 and finalists will be announced in November 2023. As a former student of a fashion academy, my thoughts turn to my precious dusty books and works in the so-called library archives, now de free access for the public. public. How much I would have liked to show them and their work potential to be admired -and discussed- from multiple perspectives and not relegated to the school context. So today, with ITS Arcademy, the school becomes directly a museum and a source of pollution, making Trieste more contemporary than ever.
