Polimoda is celebrating the start of the 2022/2023 school year with a special evening event at Villa Favard for new students arriving in Florence from all over the world. New developments in 2022-2023 include the start of the Li Edelkoort and Gucci Master’s programmes, new courses on the metaverse and food styling, and collaboration with Microsoft Garage and the United Nations Conscious and Lifestyle Network.
At the start of the academic year at Polimoda, classrooms and workshops are coming back to creative life with a population of around 2,000 young people from all over the world (over 70 different nationalities).
The Florentine fashion school organized a back-to-school evening in the garden of Villa Favard, the storied residence that is now the school’s headquarters and was chosen just a few days ago, on account of its artistic and architectural worth, as one of the venues for the FAI Autumn Days. Nearly 400 new students who have only just arrived in Florence were welcomed by a light show including the projection of all the students’ names on the villa’s facade. The event was also a celebration of the diversity and multiculturalism that are inscribed in the school’s DNA and an invitation to freely express creative identity, as embodied by the “Be Yourself” dress code. A number of students were made social ambassadors for the evening, meeting and introducing the new students on Polimoda’s TikTok and Instagram channels and talking about the uniqueness of this community.
Polimoda is a skholè 3.0. A place where you can discuss, experiment and dialogue with others who share the desire to create a different, better fashion. We don’t teach how to design clothes here but how to plan radical ideas. We encourage students to challenge the status quo and develop their own personal vision. We want them to go beyond confines and conventions and be at the front line of social and cultural change. Our aim is to train a new generation of professionals capable of taking up the challenges of the future and bringing innovation into fashion
Under Giornetti’s leadership, Polimoda is about to embark on an academic year full of new developments. Of the courses now starting, there are two new Master’s, one in Retail and Omnichannel Fashion Management in partnership with Gucci and the other in Textiles from Farm to Fabric to Fashion under the mentorship of Li Edelkoort, one of the world’s most influential trend forecasters. The undergraduate course in Fashion Marketing Management and the Master’s in International Fashion Business will be supported, respectively, by the partnership with Microsoft Garage and collaboration with the Conscious Fashion and Lifestyle Network (a United Nations platform), adding to the School’s host of prestige academic collaborations, from Tod’s to Ferragamo and from Vogue Italia to Richemont. Notable mentors include Marco De Vincenzo (who recently made his MFW debut as Etro creative director) for the Master’s in Collection Design, Tim Blanks for Fashion Writing and Curation, Bruce Pask for Merchandising & Buying, Caroline Issa for Fashion Design, Kris Van Assche for Creative Direction, and Serge Girardi for Fashion Styling.
But this year the School’s offering is going beyond fashion itself. Polimoda has always believed in a concept of fashion that’s not self-referential but free, independent and characterized by constant searching for contaminations and collaborations beyond the clothing industry. This has led it to introduce two new short courses, Fashion for Metaverse and Food Styling, the former exploring technologies, scenarios and opportunities that the metaverse can offer the fashion industry, the latter focusing on aesthetic cross contaminations between design and cuisine, a blending of sartorial and culinary excellences in collaboration with star chefs.
Polimoda will also be celebrating Italian fashion with the publication (at the beginning of 2023) of a book on Giovanni Battista Giorgini, produced in collaboration with Gruppo Editoriale and based on material provided by the Giorgini Archive. This unique volume will be the first account of the complex figure of Giorgini, a true visionary of the modern concept of fashion. Polimoda naturally comes to mind here, as its mission, by definition, is to unite history and the new generations, with the aim of promoting the development of young talents and bringing together different cultures and ideals to plot the future of fashion.
It will therefore be a year packed with projects and collaborative efforts in which fashion will be fed by new influences, a year rich in opportunities for experimenting with different artistic visions and cultural contaminations and for preparing a future generation of professionals capable of bringing new energy to the industry, meaning their knowledge, awareness, creativity and innovation.