POLIMODA STUDENTS
NABA – NUOVA ACCADEMIA DI BELLE ARTI
MOODART Photos by Camilla Dalla Costa @candalla photos
IED – MILANO FASHION SCHOOL
FERRARI FASHION SCHOOL
Dear Shaded Viewers,
Milan knows how to seduce. But during Fashion Week, just steps from the glossy runways and champagne receptions, another kind of spectacle is unfolding—quieter, sharper, and far more dangerous to ignore. HYDRA – An Illusion of Abundance is not a collection. It’s not a campaign. It’s a reckoning.
Conceived by Simone Botte of Simon Cracker, visual artist and educator Mira Wanderlust, and painter-sculptor Luca MR, the project borrows its name from the mythological beast whose severed heads only multiply. The metaphor is brutal and precise: fast fashion is a creature that regenerates endlessly, devouring resources, labor, and meaning in its wake. Every trend erased spawns three more. Every garment discarded feeds the hydra’s appetite.
Throughout Milan—across the windows of four Humana Vintage stores and one Humana People location—installations crafted by students from IED Milano, NABA, Polimoda, MOODART, and Ferrari Fashion School arrest the gaze. These are not displays. They are disturbances. Garments deemed non-reusable, pulled from Humana’s sorting center in Pregnana, are reimagined not as trash but as testimony. The visual storytelling challenges passersby to confront the environmental footprint of their own wardrobes, the ghost trail of their impulse purchases.
The project unfolds in three acts:
February 16 marked the unveiling—students materializing their critiques through styling, sculpture, and visual merchandising. What cannot be worn again becomes, paradoxically, unmissable. The installations remain through February 24, an immersive confrontation timed deliberately with Fashion Week’s spectacle of newness.
On February 24 at 5 PM, the conversation shifts from image to discourse. At Humana People (Via Edmondo de Amicis 45), a panel titled “Fashion Meets Impact: Schools, Creatives, and the Third Sector Rethink the Future of Fashion” brings together Simone Botte, Riccardo Carrapa (Course Leader at Ferrari Fashion School), Alfio Fontana (CSR & Corporate Partnership Manager at Humana Italia), and Luca MR, moderated by Mira Wanderlust. The discussion is open to the public—an invitation to question, to listen, to resist easy answers.
Then, February 25 at MiArt Gallery (via Brera 3), the project crescendos. From 11 AM to 5 PM, student works and live art performances by Mira W. Studio animate the space. At 5 PM, an exhibition opens featuring works by Mira Wanderlust, Luca MR, and the participating schools, with a charitable sale supporting Humana People to People. By 6:30 PM, live music by Bastiano fills the gallery as cocktails circulate and the works remain on view—a closing ritual that fuses art, activism, and community.
But this is not a feel-good sustainability story. The emotional weight lies in where the proceeds go: the Youth Academy of DAPP Zambia, a two-year rehabilitation program for former street youth aged 16 to 18, offering vocational training in tailoring, design, and other skills. Each year, 10 to 15 adolescents graduate, reintegrate into their communities, and receive mentorship to start small businesses. The circle closes: fashion’s waste funds fashion’s future, channeled through hands that deserve a second chance.
Hydra does not offer solutions. It offers a mirror. In a season obsessed with what’s next, it asks: What if we stopped? What if abundance is the illusion, and scarcity—the discipline of restraint—is the only luxury left?
Mira Wanderlust, whose abstract paintings have been featured in I-D Italy, Vogue Talents, and ELLE Italia and who has collaborated with the European Space Agency, works with waste materials, organic pigments, and found objects. Her art is born from loss—her father’s death at 17 and the promise she made to travel the world in his honor. Her work is a study in empathy, mystery, and the untranslatable emotions that haunt us. Simone Botte’s Simon Cracker brand has, since 2010, made upcycling a practice of radical individuality, transforming discarded garments into stories that resist disposability. Luca MR, who has exhibited at the Grand Palais, the Stelline Foundation, and the Museum of Hong Kong, explores youth, masculinity, and identity through painting, sculpture, and performance—most notably in The Renaissance Boys, a multimedia investigation of what it means to be young and male today.
Together, they have built something urgent: a project that confronts the fashion industry not with scolding but with art, not with data but with feeling. Because fashion is not only an economy. It is also an emotional contract—a promise that what we wear will make us visible, desirable, new. Hydra asks what happens when that promise breaks.
The hydra grows new heads. But myths also teach us this: some monsters can only be defeated by fire.
HYDRA – An Illusion of Abundance
February 16–25, 2026
MiArt Gallery, Via Brera 3, Milan
humanaitalia.org
