Ahead of Vogue World: Milano, a Visual Feast Celebrating Decades of Italian Fashion Splendor

Beneath the glorious, soaring glass-and-iron dome of Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, visitors queue every day to perform an unusual ritual: They place one heel on the private parts of a bull rendered in mosaic on the ground beneath them, press down hard, and spin around three times for good luck. So many do so, in fact, that the Galleria’s tesserae are gradually but constantly ground away. Earlier this year, in May, the resulting crater had to be restored once again; by early June, the replacement marble had been stabilized and polished, and the public was invited to resume their spinning.

The Italian fashion system has also been spinning since the mid-1970s, when Milan emerged as the global center of an advanced network of industries devoted to clothing, textiles, and design. Like that much-abused bull, Italian fashion’s rise was built on history and tradition, with a legacy of craft extending back to the Renaissance. Yet what arose was technologically and aesthetically radical: a new synthesis of specialist manufacturing and industrial scale, animated by pioneering designers—not least Giorgio Armani, who founded his company in 1975—prepared to dismantle established ideas of how clothes should be constructed, presented, and worn.

Half a century later, that system remains formidable. Almost 80 percent of the supply chain managed by Kering—the group behind Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Saint Laurent—is located in Italy. However, what once represented modernity and innovation is now discussed at least as often through the prism of heritage, craftsmanship, archive, and tradition. These qualities remain enormously valuable, of course, though in the wrong hands they can also become stultifying. Italian fashion, then, stands at a crossroads between past and future, heritage and progression, craft and technology. Can it use what it has inherited as the foundation of another great leap forward?

The Galleria—and Vogue World: Milano, staged here on September 22—perfectly embodies that crossroads. It was the site of the first Prada store and remains home to Italian names both long-established and repeatedly reinvented. It is itself a marvel of 19th-century technology and, positioned between the Duomo and La Scala, connects two great Milanese temples of human invention—one devoted to faith, the other to performance—through a cathedral dedicated to commerce.

Our fifth global fashion celebration is a story emerging through distinctive acts centered on themes as diverse as craft, industrialization, image making, intelligent technology, and imagination. Beginning with the precious surfaces of the Italian handiwork—velvet, brocade, lace, and embroidery—the drama unfolds into the machine age, where tailoring is made lighter, more formfitting, and more expressive by Giorgio Armani and others. From there, a Made in Italy movement centers the bombshell glamour of Versace and Dolce & Gabbana and the saturated patterns of Missoni and Pucci. Finally, the monochrome clothes of the final act offer blank canvases for experimentation, looking toward a future in which technology can enhance and elevate the human creative process.

The clothes photographed in these pages occupy that same territory. Produced by some of Italy’s greatest makers—​Valentino, Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, and Versace among them—they come from techniques, silhouettes, and visual dialects accumulated over generations. However, like all fashion, their impact depends on how contemporary designers reflect their moment, from Prada’s incorporation of sportswear motifs and technical materials into its unique articulation of femininity to Pierpaolo Piccioli’s radical performance of couture silhouettes via Moncler’s first Genius collection. And as Versace’s remade tribute to Gianni Versace’s 1991 Vogue cover catsuit attests, Italian fashion became globally dominant not only because Italy produced extraordinary clothes, but because those clothes were also translated into extraordinary images that propelled fashion into the bloodstream of culture.

Our hunch is that Italian fashion—and the sensibility that created it—is positioned for a fresh Renaissance. Technology, of course, possesses no cultural meaning by itself—instead, meaning emerges from the human decisions through which it is shaped and applied. Italy’s fashion system was created through exactly such decisions: converting inherited skills into modern processes, and manufactured clothes into globally compelling images. New technologies now challenge Italian fashion to perform that conversion again.

Down on the Galleria floor, the bull offers an answer. Tradition survives there not by standing still, but with action—and by being remade, rebuilt, and improved. Fashion’s spin never ceases.

In this story: hair, Kiyoko Odo; makeup, Lynsey Alexander; tailor, Anh Duong; manicurist, Lora De Sousa.

Produced by BIG ONE at Studio Rouchon. Set Design: Felix Gesnouin.

This article was originally published on Vogue.com.