Dear Shaded Viewers,
I’d love to introduce you to Melampo, one of my new discoveries during Milan Fashion Week.
Melampo is a family lexicon. Starting right from the brand’s name, made of the initials of whom converted an artisan shop into a solid industrial reality. As happens only in Italy, the story began many years ago with handmade caps, then proceeded to men’s shirts and to everything a woman needs to be stylish. The history of Melampo boasts a two-generation craftsmanship heritage. Their grandfather was a pioneer who in 1947 established a small millinery shop: only hand-made, of course. In the Seventies the shop evolved and became an workshop. The small Milan-based business started producing shirts for the first wave of big Italian labels. Armani and Valentino were its best-known clients. Today, sisters Lulù and Anna, the direct descendants turned the family-run company into a brand. In the 2000s Melampo designed some of the key staples of contemporary fashion. Focusing on nymph-like languid sheerness and oversize constructions, on ladylike gentle ruffles, pleats on impactful graphic color-blocking and the architectural effects on long silk dresses worn with long denim jackets and removable collars with tattoos prints. Melampo incorporated in its garments the enthusiasm of the post-war economic boom, the skills of the apparel industrialization on a global scale, and also the vision of two Italian young women who experienced fashion as insiders. It certainly happened to Lulù Poletti and her siblings, Anna and Bruno, when they decided to rely on memory, with no complications, and on the ludic element of the childhood they spent in the factory – that’s where they played – to express the complexity and heterogeneity of this story. Melampo weaves together material from different disciplines: architecture, photography, tailoring, and entrepreneurship. The brand evolves around words like ‘wearability’, ‘measure’, ‘model’, ‘technical control’, ‘tattoo’, ‘body’, ‘freedom’ and ‘lightness’. With a surprising instinct for time, Melampo tries to maintain the quality of the past while designing a new future that stands for what women really like: a certain sexy-comfy style that we all aspire to.
www.melampo.eu
Later,
Giorgia