ITS Residency 2025 – Crafting Community, Not Competition, A new chapter in supporting emerging talents.

For more than two decades the ITS stage was, unapologetically, a competition. Prizes were handed out to winners who would step on stage to receive them. Others would go back home sometimes with the experience of a lifetime, yes, but without the opportunities granted to those holding an award in their hands.

It is something we’ve been reflecting on, for quite a while. It felt unfair, and the more we reasoned about what a competition is, the less we liked it.

So last year we stood back and asked ourselves a disarmingly simple question: What if the real prize were the relationships forged along the way? That reflection gave birth to a brand-new format: a collaborative creative residency that places shared growth over individual glory. “Fashion isn’t a boxing ring,” remarks Barbara Franchin, founder of ITS and president of Fondazione ITS. “It’s a relay race. Talents move the baton forward when they run together.”

Entirely conceived with the support of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region as part of GO! Borderless – Gorizia and Nova Gorica European Capitals of Culture 2025, the new ITS Residency format embodies a shift from competition to connection—reflecting a broader commitment to overcome physical, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries.

ITS Residency in 2024 was deliberately experimental. At its close, participants filled in an extensive survey in which we asked not just what had worked but what could and should be improved. Their replies were refreshingly candid: longer workshops, more hands-on heritage craft, extra space for peer-to-peer critique, fewer formal lectures, a broader cultural lens, and a few leisure moments to mingle and bond more and decompress from the tight residency schedule. Those pages of feedback became the blueprint for 2025.

We first of all decided that if we were to give out an award, it would go to everyone. The newly created ITS Creative Excellence Award 10×10×10 granted each of the ten selected designers (which we urge you to discover here) with a €10,000 scholarship ahead of their arrival.

Trieste served as home base for ITS Residency, but the programme unfurled across the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region: inspired by GO! Borderless, we moved beyond the geographic confines of a single city to explore the region’s cultural and creative landscape. The grandeur of Villa Manin in Passariano, Udine, opened the program welcoming the designers for the first 5 days, bringing them into contact with local craftspeople and textile heritage at the border between fashion and artisanship. The journey then continued in Trieste at ITS Arcademy, with excursions in town to visit the gusty cliffs of the Castle of Miramare and to the Trieste waterfront for a tailored cooking class, providing both a cultural opportunity and the chance to disconnect for a moment from fashion, and connect among themselves.

Workshops balanced heritage and future-thinking: traditional “scarpets” shoe-making in partnership with the Michele Gortani Carnic Museum, a nod to the artisan traditions rooted in the mountains of Carnia, knitwear with Modateca’s Sonia Veroni (daughter of the “Queen of Knitwear” Deanna Ferretti), industrial design with Milan Triennale’s Marco Sammicheli, circular-design hacking sessions with WRÅD’s Matteo Ward, Fashion Revolution’s Orsola de Castro and Fondazione Sozzani’s Sara Sozzani Maino, night-time sound walks led by visiting philosophers, and one-to-one portfolio surgeries with industry insiders like stylist Tom Eerebout, head hunter Valentina Maggi from Floriane de St Pierre et Associés, from OTB, Luxottica and Swatch.

Each workshop was designed not just to pass on knowledge, but to dismantle boundaries—between design and craft, between theory and practice, between local heritage and international innovation—fulfilling the Borderless vision behind the project. And every element answered the feedback provided by the class of ’24. “We promised to listen, and we did,” Franchin explains. “This residency is co-authored by its own alumni.”

Besides the workshops and mentoring, ITS Residency seems to have squared the circle in fuelling our “ITS Family” approach. “We’ve always preached family and networking,” says Franchin, “but the Residency now turns that sermon into lived reality. Prizes end up in drawers; relationships move with you for life.”

This is proven by the innumerable anecdotes and memories from those ten days, which tell a story of friendship as vivid as any runway spectacle. Long bus rides turned into endless rounds of “Would you rather…?” and “If you were a vegetable, which one?” Endless linguistic scrambles to translate Italian proverbs into English. Celebrating two birthdays, Qianhan Liu’s, and Zhuen Cai’s first one outside China. Discovering that local wine costs less than bottled water (which sparked considerable euforia). Qianhan’s strategic cat-naps which she would take every afternoon like clockwork. Maximilian Raynor’s determination to practice his Italian which led to introducing himself as “Massimiliano, ma con la X”. And the karaoke epilogue on the final night, when designers, jurors and staff crammed into Trieste’s only karaoke bar to sing ballads melted into ’90s rap until 3 in the morning. And one that only who was there will get: the farmer teaching his dog to drive the tractor…

These are flashes that seem to be coming from a dinner table conversation with friends who have been on holiday together in some far away place for quite a while, and you’re kind sitting close to their table and thinking “wow, these guys really bonded and must have been on some amazing trip together.” Precisely what we felt (and hoped for) when we saw the ITS Contest 2025 lot leave to fly back home – each in their own corner of the world – when it was over.

It was a borderless journey in every sense: across geography, disciplines, and backgrounds. A journey made possible by the support of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, through the GO! Borderless project, which believes in the power of creativity to connect people and ideas beyond borders.

The 2025 edition proves the model works and planning for 2026 is already under way. “Supporting young talent today means lowering the walls they face, not raising podiums,” Franchin concludes. “Collaboration isn’t a buzzword—it’s our most responsible choice. It is the future.”

If ITS once crowned winners, it now cultivates a future of fashion which feels unexpectedly, wonderfully human and inclusive.

photo credit: Giuliano Koren