W: Patsy Glass I: Daniele Venturelli
What separates IED’s class of 2026 from the usual graduate runway pack is raw, unfiltered conviction. Not a single one of these eight designers hid behind empty styling tricks, corporate moodboards, or tired streetwear tropes. Every stitch was anchored in lived friction—whether dissecting Sardinian ritual, detonating gender binaries through battered plush, or ripping up family heirlooms to make something fearless.
Titled Architetture mutevoli del corpo (Mutable Architectures of the Body), the October 28 runway brought together eight handpicked rebels from across IED’s Italian campuses. Operating under the school’s 2026 manifesto of Plural Intelligences, the lineup ditched commercial safe bets and trend-chasing nonsense in favour of clothing as psychological armour, emotional scar tissue, and pure physical rebellion.
Forget polite seasonal palettes or buyer-friendly tailoring. The unified vision behind Architetture mutevoli del corpo treated the human silhouette as an unstable, contested territory where memory, desire, and trauma collide head-on. Rather than eight disconnected mini-collections fighting for Instagram clout, the show moved like a single, breathing organism—tense, visceral, and unapologetically confrontational.
Arianna Semprucci – Brevemente complessi come ombre sulla terra (Womenswear)The Vibe: Fluid, high-contrast shadow play.The Reality: Asymmetrical layering pitting crisp, structural taffeta and dense velvet against ghost-like chiffon. Semprucci treated shadow as a physical weapon, capturing the shifting, unpinnable nature of modern identity.
Anna Buffetti – MNEME (Womenswear)The Vibe: Intimate, heirloom deconstruction.The Reality: Raw, handcrafted interventions on inherited fabrics and family keepsakes. Instead of treating nostalgia like something trapped behind museum glass, Buffetti’s garments functioned as living emotional archives—proving personal history is something you wear, tear, distress, and rebuild.
Emilio Mazza – L’ultimo porto (Menswear)The Vibe: Salted, weathered maritime existentialism.The Reality: Desaturated palettes, clashing heavy-to-sheer fabric weights, and tensioned, dissolving weaves. Rooted in the image of a man lingering on a harbour wall before dawn, unable to board the ship, Mazza translated masculine vulnerability and hesitation into rugged, anti-hero menswear.
Erika Angeloro – Stuffed (Genderless)The Vibe: Tactile, nostalgic childhood memory fragments.The Reality: Worn textiles, deconstructed plush surfaces, and exaggerated padded volumes transform discarded soft toys into wearable emotional armour. Treating involuntary nostalgia as physical weight, Angeloro crafts a tender yet unsettling genderless silhouette that turns fragile recollections into a comforting, sculptural presence for the contemporary body.
Federico Stella Nicosia – Vestige of Tide (Womenswear / Menswear)The Vibe: Deep-sea dystopia meets fluid, post-gender tailoring. The Reality: Organic, tide-eroded textures and dual-gender silhouettes built around the myth of a creature dragged up from the ocean depths. Nicosia closed the loop on the show’s theme of radical adaptation—blurring the line between human anatomy and marine relic.
Iris Balla – Dolce Segreto (Womenswear)The Vibe: Dark, seductive mythological folklore noir.The Reality: Shadowy silhouettes, intricate drapery, and eerie, alluring textures bridge ancient archetypes like Lilith and the Japanese Jorōgumo with contemporary anime aesthetics. Balla explores the uncanny intersection of eros, prohibition, and feminine transformation, inviting viewers into a brooding, theatrical wardrobe where beauty and unease effortlessly coexist.
Gabriele Puddu – Jointed (Womenswear)The Vibe: Kinetic, marionette-inspired anatomical liberation.The Reality: Articulated wooden structures, taut suspension cords, and rigid, carapace-like panelling gradually yield to fluid, unrestricted movement. Drawing inspiration from a room of hanging puppets, Puddu charts the metamorphosis from externally controlled armour into an expressive, autonomous organism, balancing sculptural constraint with raw physical vulnerability and grace.
Gianpaolo Senette – Su Battile (Womenswear)The Vibe: Raw, ritualistic Sardinian folk tragedy.The Reality: Stark, weathered textures, mask-like framing, and stripped-back, Giacometti-esque proportions inspired by Lula’s archaic Su Battileddu carnival ritual. Confronting collective guilt and hollow societal scapegoating, Senette delivers haunting, fiercely sculptural womenswear that exposes the human fragility lurking beneath traditional ceremonial facades and communal mythmaking