Featured in Out of Fashion: the first student profiled
Daniele Orlandi was a student of the first edition of Out of Fashion, Italy's first high-level training course on conscious, ethical and innovative fashion, organised by Connecting Cultures in collaboration with the Fondazione Gianfranco Ferré (Milan) and University of the Arts London (UAL). Contributors and speakers included artists Michelangelo Pistoletto and Lucy Orta, sustainable-fashion researcher Kate Fletcher and economist Marco Ricchetti. He was the first student the programme chose to profile, in a piece by journalist Paola Baronio published on 11 December 2014.
About the profile
The piece traces a path that runs, in its own words, from Como to Berlin, from Antwerp to Florence, to Milan and Rome. Orlandi comes from a family of doctors — both his father and grandfather practised medicine — and followed that path himself for three years at the University of Insubria after a linguistic-focused high school. A trip to Berlin changed course: immersed in the city's creative scene of artists, designers, musicians and gallerists, he found himself drawn in, and a visit to Antwerp, where he was struck by the fashion academy show, convinced him he wanted to make clothes himself. His parents, he found, needed less convincing than he'd expected.
He was fortunate in his timing: the Orientation Design course he chose at Polimoda in Florence coincided with the arrival of some of the Antwerp Academy's best teachers that same year, three months he calls formative. Back in Berlin and confronted with what he describes as "the difficulty of doing," he recognised he needed real manual skill, spending the following three years at AFOL Moda in Milan, where he trained as a tailor and learned to use a sewing machine. The proudest result of that period was sewing his sister's wedding dress, with help from one of the school's pattern-making teachers — a detail he would repeat, unprompted, in a separate interview two years later.
His training continued at Istituto Secoli — pattern-making, artisanal tailoring, fashion design, textile studies and costume history — alongside a first small collection of easy-to-wear silk and cotton dresses in spring 2014, well received by friends but pushed further by tougher critiques from his teachers at Marangoni. At the time of the interview he was in Rome discovering moulage, the technique of sculpting fabric directly on a dress form, which he describes as opening up a new kind of creativity. Asked about his values, he ties them directly to Out of Fashion's own concerns — production conditions, respect for the people behind a garment, a femininity built on essentials rather than stereotypes — and sums up his view of fashion itself: "La moda è uno strumento di comunicazione e un forte agente di cambiamento" — fashion is a tool of communication and a powerful agent of change.
The piece closes on where that thinking was headed next: a capsule collection planned for spring 2015, built from moulage-developed pieces, an interest in maker culture and laser-cutting fab labs, and an early collaboration taking shape with a Como boutique for its presentation and with the bag brand Ariafritta.
Source
Out of Fashion, "Le storie di out of fashion: Daniele" — 11 December 2014. Text by Paola Baronio. Course organisers: Connecting Cultures and Fondazione Gianfranco Ferré, Milan. Current course site: outoffashion.connectingcultures.it/corso