ELISA ZADRA

ITALY / ON STAGE

SCHOOL

IED - ISTITUTO EUROPEO DI DESIGN Milan

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ABOUT THIS PROJECT

My name is Elisa Zadra,

I’m 22 and I am about to graduate from IED Moda Milano.

I was born in a small village in the north of Italy, where family, culture and traditions are the most important values. Growing up in such a small and isolated place, thought me the importance of sticking together, carrying on the traditions and respect what we have, even if it is little.

Now that I live in Milan, when I think about the culture that raised me, it feels like living in another country, while I am actually only 3 hours away from home.

When I moved to the city in order to study fashion, I brought with me those values that made me who I am. I think that if it wasn’t for the fact that I grew up in a place where people do not even think about fashion as a career choice, I wouldn’t have developed the kind of vision on things, especially on design and fashion, that I have now.

Regarding my design experience, everything starts from me and from the amazing place where I was born. Once I moved from the mountains to the city, I realized how much people get affected by the speed of the contemporary world, by its habits and, above all, by its needs.

I would walk around Milan and run into a homeless man just outside La Rinascente, with people walking out of the shop, and onto his bed, not watching where they were going because of the amount of shopping bags they were carrying. Is this what we are all going to turn into?

I began to see that what we are doing to ourselves, we are also doing to the earth that gave us a home; we buy, and throw away, not considering the fact that one day Earth is going to say ‘I had enough, I am not even going to give you the Air that you breath anymore.

Therefore, when it comes to my work, the keyword is, most of the times, REPAIR. The message is “Stop craving for the new, and the newer; stop the crazy industry that is fast fashion; go back to those times when buying something was a great event, rather than a habit”.

When it came down to choosing a topic for my thesis collection, I started thinking in a different way, I started thinking about what fashion really means to me, about what it could be, also for others, and about what it could do.

Fashion to me is, first of all, art. I know many people disagree, but I also know that many agree. Fashion can have such a powerful voice, either it is used in a very right or very wrong way, it still has that something that can have journals or mags to talk about it for months.

I feel like I already have everything that I need in my life, just like most of the people that I see around. We have got so many things, that we forget them, making them loose their power, that special thing that was given to them when they were created.

This is what I want to stand up against, the indifference and the little attention of things that people developed in the latest decades.

We are looking to a future that sees us all as the same, and is not going to take money in exchange for a way out.

We live in order to please the Economic System, which is lead by Industrialization

and Consumerism. In the last decades, this fact has been turning people into Slaves, taking away what little we have left of our Past, the Memories of a Culture, together with our Humanity, sense of Community and Tradition, just to give space to the craving machines that lead our system.

Desired Dystopia, my thesis collection, shows the vision of what the future could be like, if we do not stop.

A Dystopian vibe that wants to let people know that we may be looking to a Future that is not going to look at the designer brand we are wearing and definitely not to the quantity of stuff that our wardrobe is able to contain.

Desired Dystopia is a collection that not only talks about ethics, not only talks about a future world that is going to become a big dump, but it is a collection that has been created with ethic, by recycling and upcycling. During the past year, I have been collecting waste materials from industries, second hand pullovers that were thrown out, ready to be up cycled, and end cones from yarn companies, calling out for help and craving to be recycled.

Desired dystopia is my way of doing art and fashion at the same time; it is my way of saying no to that side of industrialization that is turning the world into a landfill; Desired Dystopia is my way of saying sorry to the earth, a way to tell her that I love her and that in my little, I am trying.

This collection is my attempt to send a message that really needs to be heard, not only by the fashion industry, but by everybody.

My work is thought to speak to everybody; it may not be everybody’s usual style choice, but it should definitely be taken into consideration as a lead for a new life choice.

Sometimes I like to overthink about grandparent’s motto ‘si stava meglio quando si stava peggio’. We are so lucky compared to people that used to live back in the 20th century; we have advanced technology, we made some serious progress regarding science, and yet we sometimes use the good to do bad, why is that?