The iconic style of Dolce&Gabbana meets the prestigious Istituto Marangoni Milano for the brand’s first-ever collaboration with a top fashion school, involving students from the Menswear Fashion Design Master’s course.

The Nero Sicilia project launched by the fashion label invited students to make a cultural and social reflection, exploring the relation between past traditions and new trends within the fashion industry, shining the spotlight on topical issues such as sustainability, innovation and gender fluidity, opening a dialogue with Gen Z.  

Students were asked to create a collection investigating the importance of the black color within the Sicilian tradition, combining new product concepts with D&G’s strong identity. Young designers developed both a collection of ten total looks with products from different categories and accessories, and a creative concept for D&G Fashion Show, considering all the organisational aspects of the event.

Each student was given the unique opportunity to present their work to the Dolce&Gabbana Design department and discuss it with prominent industry professionals. The brand later collected the most deserving projects into a short video, conceived to give voice to the students, so they could narrate firsthand the creative ideas that inspired their collections.

For his project “NewSicilianità”, Pedro Covelo was inspired by film cultural references, exploring the poetic soul of Sicilian tradition. His collection narrates the different stages of human life, starting with religious traditions from birth to wedding. Garments clearly embrace Sicilian cultural and historical references with a contemporary take on traditional clothing, according to a renewed brand vision.

A collection by student Yuna Oh, “La Fuitina” narrates different aspects of one of the most typical moments in Sicilian stories: the love getaway. The collection features a juxtaposition of romantic pieces, revealing the most thrilling moments of love, alongside garments related to the most grotesque and tragic aspects of love getaways. The resulting project is packed with references to tradition with a present-day perspective.

Student Gianluca Riminucci developed his collection entitled “ll Cattivo” starting from “cattiva”, a word that means widow in Sicilian dialect. The mourning culture unfolds among different garments with references to local customs, where black becomes an everyday colour. The collection embraces fluidity, masculinity stretches on classic products and colours span from black to total white, to indicate the transition from mourning to a return to life.

Finally, the “Amoroso” project by Ali Jawad is based on the concept of love, the ultimate feeling that runs the world: all the symbols in the collection feature works, patterns and appliqués about this topic. Created with a contemporary vision and manufactured with cutting-edge textile fibers, the garments are the result of the designer’s analysis of Sicilian life and past traditions, investigated through historical photographs.

Watch the video to find out more.