By Elena Sendona on October 7, 2025
In a fashion season saturated with spectacle, art259design delivers something radically human for Spring/Summer 2026. At the helm is founder and creative director Alberto Affinito, whose latest collection was born from an unexpected muse: a fleeting encounter with a young girl returning from dance class. Her posture, clothing, and effortless presence sparked an introspective journey into the relationship between the body and its expression through clothing.
The presentation that took place during the Milan Fashion Week emulated this initial inspiration featuring ballet dancers practicing and tuning into a live piano set, the pianist perched into a disheveled romantic decor that alluded to another era but also the timelessness of this rare art form.
What emerged is a collection where the person—not the garment—takes center stage. Rather than concealing or transforming the body, the clothes in this collection echo and elevate it.
Transparency, lightness, and sculptural construction create a wardrobe that doesn’t impose a narrative, but invites the wearer to tell their own.
Silk georgette, memory fabric, and linen satin serve as key textiles, chosen not just for beauty but for their expressive potential. Cold dyeing techniques lend a ghostlike diffusion to the fabrics, while delicate folds, ruffles, and seams are arranged like choreography on the human form. The result is clothing that moves and breathes with the body—never stiff, never fixed.
Affinito’s fascination with texture comes through in the dual-sided linen satin, whose elegant sheen contrasts with a more rugged underside, offering flexibility between sophistication and everyday function.
Metallic threads and cotton metal velvet—long-standing signatures of the brand—return in sculptural forms crafted directly on mannequins. Each piece feels one-of-a-kind, like a gesture caught mid-air.
There’s no hiding the body here. There’s also no exploiting it. Instead, the collection finds a delicate tension between reveal and conceal, using sheerness, distortion, and asymmetry to honor intimacy without spectacle.
Memory fabric, light and moldable, appears as though caught in motion, mimicking the spontaneous arcs and twists of the body in dance.
The final pieces take a raw, more grounded turn. Crumpled poplin, untreated denim, and distressed jersey introduce a sporty edge, bringing the collection back down to earth—because the body is not only a vessel of grace, but also of reality, friction, and effort.
Perhaps most intriguingly, this deeply aesthetic collection is underpinned by unexpected humor. Affinito found creative fuel in the iconic line from Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein: “It could work!” In a challenging chapter of his artistic life, that phrase became both mantra and permission—to experiment, to embrace irony, and to trust the process of evolution.
Unlike most fashion brands that outsource production to factories outside Milan or overseas, Alberto Affinito has chosen to keep the entire creative and manufacturing process of art259design rooted in the city itself. His atelier, located in Milan’s Via Morimondo, functions as both a design lab and production space—an increasingly rare setup in today’s fashion industry. Here, every piece is developed, draped, dyed, and assembled under his direct supervision. This hands-on, Milan-based approach allows Affinito to maintain full artistic control and foster an intimate connection between idea and execution.
In Art259design SS26, fashion becomes more than fabric and fit. It becomes a philosophy: one that sees clothing not as armor or ornament, but as an extension of the self in flux—graceful, imperfect, and alive.
