Huge inflatable silver spheres created by artist Shawn Kolodny were suspended from the ceiling of the Missoni show venue, a space padded in plush white. Filippo Grazioli clearly had lightness on his mind for spring. “ I wanted to create a sort of put-together weightlessness,” he said backstage.
The collection’s inspiration came from a book about Ottavio Missoni’s intricate patchworks of patterns. Called Kaleidoscope of Dreams, it was an artistic project the brand’s founder pursued his entire life. “It shows an alternative reality as seen through the lens of a kaleidoscope,” explained Grazioli. He wanted to capture the joy that comes from giving the imagination the freedom to explore “new dimensions, venturing into territories of the elsewhere.”
Grazioli continues his reinterpretation of Missoni’s codes through a sort of slimming regime that makes them light to the point of ethereal nothingness. He reduced the vibrant colors the label is known for to sheer layers of diluted graphics in transparent tones; the zigzag or Fiammato patterns were also absorbed into knitted textures, becoming shadows of their previous optimistic, bold selves.
The clean-slate luminosity of white was never part of the label’s high-pitched color palette; now it’s one of the designer’s favorite colors, a parti pris signaling the personal mark he wants to leave on the “Missoni vocabulary,” as he called it. For him, modernity rhymes with reduction, a take highlighted by the elongated and slender silhouettes accented by juxtapositions of see-through strata of thin knitted jersey, softened by plays of ruffles, knots, and draping. Grazioli’s Missoni is minimal, with a pared-down vitality, like a tune played sotto voce.