Italian excellence on show at London Fashion Week

 LONDON — Italy is renowned for producing some of the biggest names in fashion, and this year’s London fashion week proved no different with Giuseppe Iaciofano’s Poet-Lab emerging as a shining star. 

 Poet-Lab was founded in 2023 by the Italian-born London-living Iaciofano, and has gone from strength to strength, proved by a successful return to London Fashion Week and New York Fashion Week debut this year - something which he said was “incredibly emotional” and a “dream,” transforming the Poet-Lab brand from an idea to a unique identity with its own place in the fashion world. 

 REMEMBER, Iaciofano’s AW27 campaign, was presented to the public with an outdoor catwalk set against a classic London background of the overground railway, brick walls and dark colours - and of course a grey sky. Models, both young and old, all wearing unique pieces with creative silhouettes, made from a variety of materials all embodying the theme of memory. What had lived in sketches for so long became tangible to the rest of the world, existing outside of the designer’s imagination.

 It is Iaciofano’s most personal collection yet, the one that he says feels “most like himself.” He decided to stop trying to make himself easily understood, to stop trying to confine himself within the fashion world’s expectations and instead decided to let his work do the talking. The proportions are stronger, the silhouettes are more uncompromising, and the emotional references are more personal, with clothes based on true experiences of him and his models. This included a dress made of bin bags, representing the story of his muse Elton Ilirjani saving a famous Albanian singer from homelessness on the streets of New York.

 The colours of the London show were more monochrome than that of the New York show, but still each piece was brimming with identity and a cohesiveness to reflect the designer’s belief that “memory is never completely accurate.” Taking recognisable elements of tailoring and familiar silhouettes, Iaciofano then disrupts or exaggerates them, reflecting how we as humans remember fragments and subconsciously try to reconstruct our memories, which then transform into something new.

 The AW27 collection does not stop at memory. It explores the tension between the confinement and self-expression, expectations and identity, and the place of the modern individual in a fast paced, globalised ever changing world in which we are constantly absorbing new experiences. The campaign, he says, is about realising that “identity is no longer fixed” and then “accepting layers rather than trying to reduce ourselves to one definition.” 

 The range of his garments reflected this, from silver pom-poms to sheer mesh, from tight fitting to billowing fabric - layers which complemented each other instead of diminishing or denying existing identity of the other. 

 Identity and memory for Iaciofano is a complex thing - his own identity consisting of existing somewhere between Italy, London and New York, somewhere between the more traditional Italy and the unforgiving, chaotic London. Italy gave him “emotion, craftsmanship, beauty and an instinctive relationship with clothing.” London and New York City gave him “freedom” - the opportunity to explore his own identity, question rules, gender and even what fashion should be. 

 Poet-Lab is undoubtedly proof of this tension between Italy and London becoming something fruitful, representative of rebelling against the modern world telling us to pick one identity. Not one piece of clothing was remotely similar to the other and that is the beauty of Poet-Lab. Iaciofano does not want to – does not have to – choose between identities. Instead, Poet-Lab shows both Italian craftmanship while also “London’s experimentation, diversity and rebellion.”

 Iaciofano has also always been fascinated by the tension and contrast of the body and the structures which surround it - the physical, mental and emotional fluidity of the human body compared to the boundaries, grids and other rigid forms created by the modern world that we have built around us.  

 He translated the interest through oversized geometry, structured tailoring, asymmetry and fabric that sometimes seem to restrict the body, as if the clothes were architecture around the person, but the human form always remains central and in control – the person is wearing the clothes, the clothes are not wearing the person. As Iaciofano puts it, “structure exists but individuality has to find a way through it.” 

 This, then, may seem to contradict his choice of Mat-B Material Bag handbags to feature on the runway, designed by trained architect and fellow Italian talent Laura Iermano. Although the two designers may seem worlds apart (even Iermano admits that their collaboration came as a "happy surprise"), their philosophy is the same. They question the meaning of craftmanship and drive the search for sustainability by giving fabric and materials "a new life and a new beauty." 

 Iermano uses upcycled materials left over from construction sites to create sustainable, artisanal handbags. Here, architecture becomes fashion. No two bags are the same, charged with individuality and identity. The bags perfectly complemented the clothes and the exploration of memory, of interacting with the world around us. Her handbags represent how change is possible, the ability for memories of the past to change into something bright and new, carving out a new identity. The collaboration, thus, adds to the narrative of the REMEMBER campaign – all materials have memory and so do the wearers. Iermano stresses this as part of the reason why the collaboration works, the ethical message of reuse and recycle behind the garments are the same, the exploration of aesthetic value of materials and transforming memory into something tangible are at the forefront of both designers' pieces. 

 Does this show mark the beginning a new era of Italian fashion? Iaciofano seems to think so. He stressed the fact that while Italian fashion has “an extraordinary heritage of craftsmanship” contemporary Italian design “cannot survive by simply repeating the past. It has to question what craftsmanship means today.” Iermano highlighted that "aesthetic issues are becoming increasingly intertwined with ethical ones," a dilemma that both Poet-Lab and Mat-B tackle head on, carving out space in the Italian fashion world by focusing on sustainability while maintaining unique personal idenity. 

 Both Poet-Lab and Mat-B fulfill the fashion-future vision of their creative directors - bold experimentation with the world around us, using materials that already have their own memory, to produce high-quality garments with to help others carve out their own identity. Their products represent a “very contemporary expression of Made in Italy,”, respecting the tradition from which they came yet refusing to stand still, pulling the innovation of Italian craftmanship forward with them. Their works focus on transformation and with them comes the transformation of Italian fashion. 

 Iaciofano is leading a quiet revolution in the world of fashion, hailing in a new contemporary age of design and showcasing other designers with the same outlook as him, such as Iermano, thriving in the chaos and complexity of being a modern individual in search of identity. As he puts it, REMEMBER shows how “we carry the past, but we are still creating what we will remember tomorrow.” And Iaciofano is most definitely creating works that the fashion world will remember in the future.