Master in Alta Moda, Fashion Design Students Begin Their First Industry Project with Tessitura Stamperia Luigi Verga and Artist Sidival Fila

The new academic year for the Master in Alta Moda, Fashion Design opens under the banner of experimentation, research, and dialogue with leading figures of Italian craftsmanship. Our students have officially begun their first Industry Project, developed in collaboration with Tessitura Stamperia Luigi Vergaand the artist Sidival Fila O.F.M., under the guidance of Project Leader Albino D’Amato and Project Assistant Letizia Sarasso.

Entitled “REDEMPTION – The New Life of Matter”, the project invites students to explore the poetic and concrete value of materiality, its memory, and the regenerative potential embedded in creative action. The encounter between Luigi Verga’s textile excellence and Sidival Fila’s artistic sensibility offers students fertile ground in which to engage with techniques, archives, production processes, and contemporary languages, while reflecting on the idea of redemption as a renewed vitality of natural materials.

Project Launch at Sidival Fila’s Atelier

To inaugurate the brief, students visited Sidival Fila’s Roman atelier – a place suspended between art, spirituality, and material rigour. Here, they were able to observe the artist’s work up close. His practice, renowned for its focus on the recovery and transformation of discarded materials — linen, cotton, silk, hemp, brocades, as well as papers, woods, metals, and previously used fabrics — served as the conceptual foundation for the project. Fila’s artistic approach, grounded in a slow and meticulous process of material rebirth, revealed to students how textiles can become living, dynamic entities. Through folds, seams and layered surfaces, his works embody the passage of time not as erasure, but as transformation — offering a profound reflection on fragility, strength, and the enduring memory of matter.

A Project Between Tradition and Innovation

The collaboration with Tessitura Stamperia Luigi Verga, a historic pillar of the Como silk district, connects students with one of the most respected producers of fabrics for high fashion. Founded in 1940 and today managed by the family’s third generation, the company combines tradition, artisanal expertise, and innovation, while maintaining every stage of production entirely in Italy.

Throughout the project, students will explore the company’s archives, jacquard processes and technical methodologies that have shaped its identity. They will be asked to develop a personal reinterpretation of the jacquard technique, transforming natural fibres into a textile that embodies the project’s core themes of renewal, simplicity and the poetic power of subtraction.

Objectives

Working in four groups, the students will develop a bespoke jacquard fabric to be used in a coherent Alta Moda capsule collection. The project encourages primary and secondary research, creative development, and continuous dialogue with both the artist and the company. Collaboration, careful observation, and a sensitive understanding of material identity will be crucial to the success of their work.

“REDEMPTION” marks the beginning of a formative journey that encourages students to slow down, observe, listen, and offer new life to matter: an experience where rigorous design, contemporary vision, and material awareness come together to shape a thoughtful and forward-looking creative practice.