Tucked away in a central Milan neighborhood that’s been home from the mid-’70s to refugees and migrants from Eritrea and North Africa, an old knitwear atelier serves as workshop-cum-headquarters to Vitelli. Vitelli is an artisanal creative community headed by Mauro Simionato, a creative director/cultural agitator with a hippie ethos. Since its inception in 2017, Vitelli has embraced holistic and sustainable production practices, a progressive social mindset, and a distinctive aesthetic, rooted in the Italian Cosmic Youth club scene of the ’80s and tinged with post-hippie, post-punk undertones. “We make experimental knitwear,” explained Simionato before the show held at Fondazione Sozzani during Milan Fashion Week, a first for the label.
Photo: Courtesy of Vitelli
“We produce exclusively from the waste of Italian fashion,” he joked. Discarded yarns and selvage are actually handpicked from deadstock and then crafted in-house at Spazio Vitelli; the batches of semi-industrial knits Vitelli produces are made in partnership with small family-owned knitters in Northern Italy, to minimize the carbon footprint while helping local suppliers’ businesses. Fiercely resourceful, Vitelli has perfected a special in-house needle-punching technique, through which it creates sheets of a hybrid textile the label calls Doomboh. Flexible, slightly felted, and beautifully textured with a sort of marbré multicolored effect, the Doomboh is draped, twisted, and “molded” into imaginative genderless shapes.
For the show, the Vitelli team stretched their artisanal and artistic muscles, adding a new hybrid fabric to their repertoire. Made by pouring algae jelly over haphazardly assembled yarns, a process that sounds slightly Pollockian, the organic textile looks rather like a jellyfish, translucent and smooth. It was cut into a simple boxy tank top worn with straight-legged pants in technicolor Doomboh.
Photo: Courtesy of Vitelli
Photo: Courtesy of Vitelli
Don’t expect fashion pyrotechnics, though; shapes are supple, balanced, and wearable. Through a variety of knitted techniques, they achieve visually impactful textures; their chromatic sense is also quite an asset. The Vitelli aesthetic is clearly influenced by a fascination for the overland route from Istanbul, Turkey, through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and India that was traveled by hippies until the late ’70s, but Simionato said that the label’s look is also influenced by the Italian sense of balanced elegance and by an appreciation for the well-made. “The masters I’m looking up to are actually Giorgio Armani, Missoni, Romeo Gigli.” Spiritual wanderers they certainly were not.
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