This year’s graduates speak through a multitude of languages – from myth to memory, geometry to folklore, existential literature to ancestral ritual. Across accessories, leather goods, and full-look collections, their work draws from poetry, philosophy, and raw, tactile experimentation. Carl Jung meets crochet. The myth of the femminiello finds a new form in embroidered denim. Primitivism is recast as a way to reclaim cultural belonging, while thermosensitive fabrics blur the line between visibility and emotion.
What unites these designers is a refusal to settle for surface. Each collection acts as a channel – for personal transformation, for sociopolitical critique, or for collective reflection. Whether revisiting Trieste’s ghost stories, reimagining the black box of aviation as a vessel of trauma and memory, or using embroidery as a therapeutic ritual, this cohort understands that fashion is not simply visual. It’s spatial, spiritual, sculptural. It’s a system for holding complexity.
The results are raw, refined and sincere. Collections speak through contradiction – pairing brutalist silhouettes with fragile detailing, or exposing the seams between couture craft and emotional vulnerability. Some pieces evoke a posthuman future, others revive the ghosts of disappearing local identities. In all cases, there is an urgency to connect – to self, to story, to community.
Presented under the banner Test Talents, this showcase is less of a final act and more of a threshold. It marks the end of a journey in formation – but also the start of something messier, riskier, and more open-ended. These aren’t just collections. They’re essays, diaries, manifestos. And they remind us that in a fashion world overrun by speed and sameness, the most radical thing a young designer can do is to be specific. To be slow. To be honest.
