Fashionlands. Clothes Beyond Borders

International exhibition explores fashion's role in transcending traditional boundaries.  

Curated by Olivier Saillard and Emanuele Coccia

Thursday 27 March 2025 — Sunday 4 January 2026

On 27 March 2025, ITS Arcademy will present Fashionlands: Clothes Beyond Borders, an exhibition project born from the second collaboration between fashion historian Olivier Saillard and philosopher Emanuele Coccia, following The Many Lives of a Garment, currently on display at Italy’s first contemporary fashion museum. The exhibition features 25 designs by emerging fashion talents. These works explore how fashion transcends traditional boundaries, presented alongside everyday attire, celebrating its power to transform the global cultural and political landscape.

“Fashion knows no boundaries. Every item of clothing redefines the border between our body and the world around it. Every item of clothing negotiates the sensitive edges that join and separate us from all other bodies. All barriers in clothes are transformed into thresholds: spaces that have to be lived in and shared. This is why the political and cultural geography which, outside of clothes, separates and distinguishes nations, classes, ages, genders, and identities, becomes in the hands of fashion a single continent, an enormous Pangaea, a single common country, the country of Fashion. This year’s exhibition aims to celebrate, through the ITS Arcademy archive collection, this ability of fashion to redesign the global political and cultural space. Fashion also knows no boundaries from another point of view: it is everywhere, it inhabits our bodies and our world without limits of space and time. It accompanies us at all times and in all places. This is why the exhibition also sets out to be an exploration of the most ordinary of clothes, those that no one sees very often because they are under other clothes, or those that are too visible and too banal to be celebrated.”

Emanuele Coccia, co-curator.