?Milan opens its doors to Pitti Immagine and launches a new collaboration that will focus on the spaces of Pavilion 3 in the area that once housed the Milan Fair. The agreement presented today certainly represents a turning point, first because Florentine Pitti Photos, chaired by Gaetano Marzotto, for some time he had been looking in vain for a stable and meaningful form of collaboration within the Milanese fashion events. Then because this agreement marks a further step forward in the attention that the Municipality has decided to pay to fashion, whose fashion shows are underway these days and will end next Tuesday. Perhaps the idea that the clothing industry plays a fundamental role in the Italian economy is beginning to make headway. It is no coincidence that the mayor of Florence Matteo Renzi, in the midst of the electoral campaign for the primary elections, also saw fit to attend the Armani and Scervino fashion shows sitting in the front row.
Starting from Milan Fashion Week in February 2013, a new salon dedicated to women's fashion, also thanks to the collaboration of CityLife, the company that is building a new residential building district right in the area where the Milan Fair once stood. It will be hosted in pavilion 3, which survived the destruction of the fair area and was designed by Paolo Vietti Violi in 1922; it had been inaugurated the following year as the Palazzo dello sport, with a large dome of iron and glass.
"Today, in a place that is symbolic of the history of Milanese fashion, a collaborative project between the Municipality, Fiera Milano and Pitti Immagine was born - said Stefano Boeri, Councilor for Culture, Fashion and Design of the Municipality of Milan, "to strengthen the trade fair presence of the Italian fashion system in Milan. Pavilion 3, which will host the initiative promoted by Pitti and Fiera Milano next February, will soon be the subject of a call for tenders addressed to all operators who want to accept the challenge to give back to the city a symbolic place of its excellence in the field of culture of costume, fashion and design. Milan ”, he added,“ will therefore become the set of three fundamental moments: the fairs, the showrooms and an increasingly rich program of events, which will strengthen the connections with the cultural and social life of the city".
The details of the project have not been disclosed, but everything suggests that the ideal point of reference will be the initiatives that Pitti Immagine has been carrying out in Florence for some time.
“It will be a new, original project”, Gaetano Marzotto limited himself to saying, “of significant dimensions, which will strengthen and qualify the offer of the next winter women's shows. The availability of a space of great charm, with very interesting sizes and architectural features, represents the detonator of this operation".
For Enrico Pazzali, managing director of Fiera Milano spa, the initiative is much more than an alliance between two important fairs, Milan and Florence. It is a strategic project for the fashion sector and for Italy, is the the result of a system vision that goes beyond localisms and has all the numbers to relaunch the centrality of Milan in the international fashion circuit and effectively support the growth of companies in the sector in the new large markets that will increasingly be the engine of the world".
It's still early to sum up this fashion week. But surely the balance won't be given so much by the numbers (the buyers have already made around three-quarters of their purchases for next spring-summer, with a budget that would appear to be lower than last year's) but by the sentiment that the many foreigners present in Milan these days will derive from it. Because today at least the market capable of supporting the Italian fashion industry is inevitably the foreign one. And perhaps it is no coincidence that the inspiration for some fashion shows, Prada in the first place, comes from the East.
Initiatives capable of giving greater breadth and greater attraction to Milan are therefore welcome, which for the first time has managed to create some important cultural events around fashion shows. Something is moving, therefore, and it makes it easier to resist the challenge with Paris.
