ITS Contest 2022 The Ark of Creativity

This is how I like to tell the story. When I was a young girl I wanted a dream dress for my high school graduation. In the building where I lived, in the town of Trieste that I love, there was a little place of wonders, a small atelier with a selection of precious fabrics. Here someone’s love of fashion rivaled and sometimes surpassed my own. Imagine me going in there. And never coming out again. Why? There is no other proof of creativity like fashion. Interpretable on so many levels, artistic, social, economic, psychological, anthropological... Even now I am still discovering more, all of which are useful to decrypt its many meanings.This is why I have decided to dedicate my life to traversing those compositional, constructional and emotional territories that make up the great puzzle of fashion as a representation of the self and, at the same time, a seismograph of a planet. By ‘fashion’, of course, I also mean the objects, whether ornamental or functional, that we wear on our bodies.

It is real, concrete and intangible, fulfilling demands of the mind and responding to those of the body. ITS was born as an incubator of new aesthetic grammars exactly twenty years ago: my desire to ‘be a family’, to be able to count on a group of people who were similar to me in terms of ideas and thought processes, led me to immediately build a small team, in order to stimulate mutual discussion, free circulation of ideas, and to welcome different points of view.

From 2002, in a city that had nothing to do with the classic fashion capitals, the first portfolios arrived from young designers from all over the world. This was in part thanks to the rapport installed with the most important fashion institutes and universities.

Prototypes, moodboards, videos, photos, music tracks arrived along with the portfolios: the manifestation of a project that gathers encounters, mental associations, happy contaminations.

It started from here, growing year after year, researching new design objects, new materials, new territories, new images. I demand a high level of professionalism from the members of the jury attending the final show and award ceremony: it is essential that honesty reigns among every member of the ITS Family, that there is no cynical approach but respect for that seed that every true designer contains within. It is up to us to nurture and cultivate it with love and care.

This practice has never failed. Perhaps in everything else, we may have become cognizant and more structured, but the focus on preserving the inner landscape of each participant has remained. What still moves me today is seeing how the arrival of the designers in Trieste during the days of ITS releases good-humoured energies, giving off an aura of cosmopolitan domesticity: after all, it is a place that has always received and hosted disparate people, cultures and spiritualities. This creates a nice emotional short circuit: with many of the finalists I stay in touch even when they become world stars like Demna Gvasalia or Matthieu Blazy, among others.

And I like to think that, if fashion is a complex universe of different materials, energies and bodies moving along different trajectories, a part of this universe - let’s call it the initial ‘Big Bang’ - was born here, under the blue skies, in front of the fiery sunsets, between a toast and an aperitif in the wonderful bars of this city.