The Archive goes didactic. students visit the ITS Creative Archive.

One of our intentions with the ITS CREATIVE ARCHIVE is to inspire generations of young designers to produce new unseen creativity. At the same time we try to understand the evolution of young creativity. Such a treasure documenting the history of fashion evolution cannot remain hidden in our attic of course, and besides communicating it we want young talents to actually see it & touch it for themselves, learning from the incredible projects developed by the over 470 finalists we have selected up to now: 14,000 portfolios, 200 outfits, 100 accessories, 60 jewelry pieces and over 700 digital photo projects documenting 14 years of young creativity is undoubtedly an impressive resource of which you can capture a glimpse in the video here. Together with our yearly trendsreport which records like a Seismograph the “waves” of creativity we have found in the portfolios for the ITS contests, our search and documentation of young creativity can really be defined as a 360° effort.

One of the best ways we can think of to turn the archive in a tool for knowledge is planning visits for students of design schools, make it something literally didactic. This is exactly what is happening: among the many visits we received, lately accessories design students from the Royal College of Art in London – one of the most important academic institutions of the United Kingdom when it comes to design and art – flew in Trieste to lay their hands and eyes on some of our treasures.

Headed by the Royal College of Art Tutor in Footwear, Accessories and Millinery Flora McLean, 1st year MA students Marco Baitella, Juyeon Hong, Woojung Jung and Helen Kirkum spent a day in the attic of our offices where our ITS CREATIVE ARCHIVE is.

We well know that look in the eyes of those who step in the archive for the first time, the same look the RCA students had: their expression was of true amazement since they would have never expected to find such a documentation of the history of ITS and of young creativity itself.

We gave them access to everything: they could have a look up close at all the outfits, accessories and jewelry pieces, studying the techniques & materials used by our finalists. They had only seen those pieces in our photogallery or in our videos so it was a giant leap in understanding more about what it takes to produce design pieces of this kind.

More importantly, our entire 14,000 portfolios archive was at their disposal. As a surprise we had prepared a selection for them from the over 70 RCA finalists we’ve had in the past, among which are names such as Aitor Throup, Justin Smith, Astrid Andersen, Heather Blake, Hanchul Lee, Mason Jung and Xiao Li. This allowed them to dive into all the details of the pieces, understanding the inspiration that generated them, the concept, the development process made of experiments and sketching, the fabrics treatments, the techniques and more.

We warmly encourage educational trips to the ITS CREATIVE ARCHIVE and are currently inviting schools to organise such trips, offering this invaluable possibility of going through the impressive number of pieces and portfolios we’ve neatly stored up to now. In our opinion, in the development of a young designer the learning possibilities that a visit to an archive like ours opens can be incredible.