Why everyone in fashion is talking about Lessico Familiare right now
Lessico Familiare’s New Age, presented at Istituto Marangoni Milano, marks a return to Milan Fashion Week shaped by memory, spirituality and reuse
Lessico Familiare and Fashion as a Lexicon of Memory and Reuse
“It’s a new age. You wake up. You manifest abundance. You light incense, palo santo, white sage. The moon speaks to you, the moon controls you. It’s 11:11, make a wish” – Lessico Familiare, New Age, Fall/Winter 2026–27
“You can be a spiritual person and still love shopping at Prada” – Madonna
After a two-year hiatus from the runway, Lessico Familiare returned to showing in Milan with New Age, its latest collection, presented at Palazzo Turati—the new campus of Istituto Marangoni Milano. Officially listed on the Milan Fashion Week men’s calendar for Fall/Winter 2026–27, the show unfolded as a deliberately co-ed proposal, with silhouettes, materials, and symbols circulating freely, unbound by gender distinctions.
The choice of venue and timing placed the fashion show within a broader cultural and educational context, reinforcing the project’s ongoing reflection on fashion as a language shaped by memory, accumulation and transmission.
From Lockdown to Milan Fashion Week: Lessico Familiare and Post-Pandemic Fashion
Founded in Milan in 2020 by emerging designers and creative minds Riccardo Scaburri, Alice Curti and Alberto Petillo, Lessico Familiare originated as an intuitive practice developed within a domestic setting during the pandemic.
Working with existing garments, discarded textiles and everyday materials found at home, the trio began assembling pieces that retained visible traces of previous lives, allowing memory and use to remain embedded in construction.
The name of the project signals its approach: Adapted (with a deliberate twist) from Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, Lessico Familiare frames fashion as a shared, evolving language, shaped by repetition and intimacy.
Curtains, tablecloths, forgotten garments and deadstock fabrics are transformed into one-off pieces whose origins remain legible, becoming an integral part of each garment’s construction and meaning.
Instead of following a traditional seasonal logic, the project evolves through accumulation and recombination, each collection serving as a new chapter in an ongoing narrative. Sustainability is foundational to this process, rooted in reuse and transformation.
Designed by Lessico Familiare, a delicate slip dress layered with sequins and lace, paired with sculptural gloves. Intimacy and evening ritual meet everyday reuse in a quiet silhouette.
What “New Age” Means in Fashion Today
With New Age, Lessico Familiare brings together traces accumulated over the years into a collection that reflects on late-20th-century metropolitan spiritualism as a cultural condition. Affirmations, incense, rituals and healing language coexist with consumer habits and pop references, forming a landscape where spirituality and material culture overlap.
Cotton-padded dresses, cocoon silhouettes, precious slip dresses, worn outerwear, layered quotations, bows and talismanic animals are assembled into a lexicon that expands through mutation. These elements and archival fragments are reinserted into the present as mutable forms, their meanings shifting through context and use.
A suspended bridal figure: a simple white dress softened by a translucent veil, evoking rites of passage, domestic spirituality and memory reassembled through restraint.
Readymade Fashion and the End of Seasonal Design
Lessico Familiare’s New Age collection follows a readymade logic that preserves garments in their entirety while relocating them into new functional and symbolic roles. Apron fronts appear as tops, shirt collars become autonomous garments, doormats are transformed into mini dresses, while skirts take on the proportions of lampshades.
A sunflower knit worn with velvet trousers merges folk imagery and reuse, turning domestic textures into symbolic armor for a post-gender, ritual-driven wardrobe. Slimmer and more defined proportions coexist with manifesto-like overcoats and deliberately flat, almost two-dimensional pieces. Elements from previous collections reappear as altered déjà vu, reinforcing a sense of continuity.
The brides from earlier chapters of the project return transformed, alongside popcorn tops with tie-dye flowers, patchwork kaftans, damask and sequinned balloon trousers, and debutante dresses crafted from unexpected materials. The resulting wardrobe privileges juxtaposition and layering, allowing different temporalities and references to coexist within the same frame.
Patchwork stripes, frayed ruffles and layered fabrics form a nomadic silhouette, where accumulated garments become talismans of memory, movement and transformation.
Why Madonna’s Ray of Light Still Matters to Fashion
The aesthetic and conceptual framework of New Age draws on the codes of late-1990s metropolitan spiritualism—a moment crystallised in Madonna’s Ray of Light. This reference serves as a cultural backdrop rather than a citation, informing the collection’s understanding of spirituality as both mediated and entangled with consumption.
Madonna’s statement—“You can be a spiritual person and still love shopping at Prada”—resonates as a premise, articulating a worldview in which ritual and desire remain in constant dialogue.
Animals recur throughout the collection as symbolic guides, appearing on trains, tiaras and garments, accompanied by good-luck charms tied with string to evoke protection while acknowledging uncertainty.
A translucent dress tied with an oversized bow reveals fragility and construction, balancing softness and structure while exposing the garment’s layered past.
Fashion as Cultural Transmission at Istituto Marangoni
Presenting New Age at the new school of Istituto Marangoni Milano reinforces the collection’s connection to education and transmission: fashion re-enters the school as a form of language, continually shaped by learning.
The reference to Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon—a cornerstone of Italian school education—acts as a structural parallel. Beneath the vaulted ceilings of Palazzo Turati’s courtyard, open to the city and illuminated by the final light of day, the show positioned fashion within a broader cultural and pedagogical framework.
Agnese Pasquinelli
Editor, Milano