Ten fashion talents showcase their work among artworks with Venice Fashion Week at Galeries Bartoux: Le Mani Sapienti presents young sustainable designers
Venice Fashion Week brings the third edition of Le Mani Sapienti to a new location: Galeries Bartoux, a new contemporary art center recently inaugurated in the former Cinema Accademia in Dorsoduro.
Ten designers present their collections among the artworks in the space: four Venetian designers – Alessandra Micolucci, BVL Venezia, Gaiofatto, Teod’Amar – and six students from the Master’s Degree in Fashion at Università Iuav di Venezia selected on the theme Quiet Luxury: Anita Barbieri, Milena Brea, Rosa Capone, Sofia Corridori, Christian Garau, Angelica Stea Pontrelli.
The project, curated by Venezia da Vivere, supports emerging brands that reinterpret fashion through manual craftsmanship and the pursuit of conscious fashion.
The day opens with the talk Crafting luxury brands curated by Upskill 4.0, a spin-off of Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, which explores how craftsmanship and sustainability can form the foundation for a responsible growth model in the sector.
Four Venetian designers for Le Mani Sapienti
Four women, four different ways of interpreting contemporary Venetian craftsmanship through natural materials, fabrics created with eighteenth-century looms, and sartorial research.
Alessandra Micolucci hand-paints organic fabrics in her atelier in Calle de la Racheta in Cannaregio. Nettle, hemp, and linen take on color through natural dyes derived from fermentation and drying of plant elements. Each garment is created entirely by her hands, with materials sourced from Italian producers of natural yarns.
Giulia Bevilacqua transforms family fabrics into contemporary accessories with BVL Venezia. The Bevilacqua family has woven silk velvet since the sixteenth century for the furnishing of museums and noble palaces. Giulia takes these fabrics and weaves them with high-quality leather to create bags and hats embroidered with precious stones by the hands of local artisans, combining the magnificence of the Serenissima with essential design.
Michela Gaiofatto studies geometries and volumes to construct garments with strong personality. After graduating in Fashion Design at Università Iuav di Venezia and gaining experience at companies such as Moncler, in 2014 NJAL selected her among the most promising designers. Her brand Gaiofatto works with fine materials and Made in Italy sartorial construction, where every detail makes each garment unique.
Norma Marzà celebrates Venice with Teod’Amar through fabrics by Luigi Bevilacqua and Rubelli. The designer opened her atelier in 2017 where artisan seamstresses handcraft beach towels, bags, kimonos, furlane, and accessories. Damasks, brocades, linen, silk, and velvet tell the story of the Serenissima tradition and keep Venetian craftsmanship alive.
Discover the collections of young designers in preview
- Milena Brea – A Body Rewritten (Corporate Grunge)
Milena Brea deconstructs the office uniform and hybridizes it with the nocturnal aesthetic of the nineties, combining deconstructed tailoring and lightness of materials. Body Rewritten starts from corporate clothing as an emblem of order, control, and belonging to a codified system, then dismantles it through irregular volumes, interrupted cuts, and insertions that recall slip dresses and light nightlife fabrics.
The result reveals a body in transition that rewrites itself through clothing, where silk chiffon, wool, cool wool, and natural yarns dialogue with the body, embodying Hélène Cixous’s rewriting of the body, in which clothing becomes the medium of femininity and identity in transformation.
- Rosa Capone – Sabotage
The concept of the collection starts from World War II, when dressing meant first and foremost resisting. Large pockets, reinforced seams, robust fabrics served to last, to endure deprivation and bombings. Beauty came later, almost by chance. The collection reverses this principle and empties function to transform it into aesthetic language. Garments become graphic detail, structural seams become ornament, technical materials lose their practical purpose and tell a new idea of the female body.
- Angelica Stea – La tarantella del macabro
Popular belief tells of a frenzied dance as a remedy for the spider’s bite, the tarantula. The dance becomes a survival ritual for those living on the margins, especially women crushed by social frustrations and psychological traumas. Dancing to exhaustion means symbolically freeing oneself from the poison. Angelica Stea reinterprets this folkloric phenomenon by working on exaggerated volumes, flowing capes, obsessive layering, extreme cuts, and distressed fabrics that tell of a body in frenzy. Monochromatic garments are charged with primitive and ritual elements, where the boundary between ecstasy and madness thins until it disappears.
- Christian Garau – In Nomine Amoris
Christian Garau’s new collection draws inspiration from Roman spirituality, Mario Giacomelli’s photographs, and sacred vestments. Two original prints from the Giacomelli archive dialogue with the garments, uniting image and material. Filippo Sorcinelli’s work inspires the tension between raw materials and luminous surfaces, creating contemporary sacredness.
The garments do not cover but reveal; they do not define but liberate. The collection tells of genderless bodies, open spaces to inhabit, a reflection on the expressive power of clothing as a form of truth.
- Anita Barbieri – LÀMIA
Anita Barbieri starts from female figures historically transformed into: witches, sorceresses, seers. Women feared, punished, invoked who embodied collective fears. The collection reclaims these figures to restore their body, their voice, working on details: French seams left visible, buttonholes made by hand with blanket stitch according to theatrical tailoring techniques. Upholstery fabrics are reinterpreted to create garments, reinforcing artisanal work and the value of material.
- Sofia Corridori – Antevasin, confini invisibili
The collection reflects on an identity that changes, stratifies, and transforms over time. Garments become a second skin that tells who we have been and who we are becoming. Modular and adaptable looks allow garments to be interchanged because identity transforms. Referencing migrations from Asia to Europe, sartorial cuts inspired by traditional garments of East Asia, such as the Uzbek chapan, have been incorporated. Linen, wool, and silk are combined with technical and performance fabrics, handcrafted, crocheted, and embroidered to keep the connection with craftsmanship alive.
Venice Fashion Week
It is a project conceived and curated since 2013 by Venezia da Vivere, a digital communication, events, and projects company whose mission is to support talent and promote Venice as an ideal city in which to live and create.
Venice Fashion Week has the patronage of:
City of Venice, Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy, Tavolo Veneto della Moda, Fondazione Cologni dei Mestieri d’Arte, Università Iuav di Venezia.
Main Partner
Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua, Palazzo Venart Luxury Hotel.
Partner
Upskill 4.0 – spin-off of Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Fondazione Giancarlo Ligabue, ITS Marco Polo Academy, Seguso Vetri d’Arte, Orsoni Venezia 1888, Kolding School of Design, City of Gdańsk, Amberif International Amber and Jewelry Fair, Fondazione La Via dell’Ambra, Libreria La Toletta, CreativeMornings Venice, Lightbox, Antonio dei Rossi, Alwaysupportalent, Associazione Piazza San Marco.
We thank
Palazzo Keller, Palazzo Nani Mocenigo, Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Galeries Bartoux Venezia, Venice Gardens Foundation, Seguso Vetri d’Arte, Bellini Canella.
The poster is designed by artist and illustrator Jacopo Ascari.
www.venicefashionweek.com
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Venice Fashion Week is a project by Venezia da Vivere © Raccontare Venezia Srls.
Article by Lucia Pecoraro.
Cover photo by Marta Formentello for Teod’Amar at Corte di Gabriela.
Photos of Galeries Bartoux by Théo Pitout.
