A youth choir from Turin made the 141-kilometer trek to Milan for Jezabelle Cormio’s debut runway show. They performed a new song composed for the show with lyrics asking if parents love their children. (“Sometimes,” Cormio, a mother herself, said with a laugh.) Her fall 2022 collectsion played on Italian souvenirs taken from South Tyrol: the heart patterns, the tiny rosette prints, and the lederhosen she remembers from her own youth growing up in Italy.
Memories of Tyrol and of childhood activities like Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and summer camp infused Cormio’s collectsion with a nostalgic edge. But she is not just a designer of emotions or cuteness—and wow, are her clothes properly cute! She is pushing her knitwear factories throughout the country to try something new and take risks; no more classic Italian brown sweaters.
What Cormio offers instead are ingeniously constructed one-piece trompe l’oeil dresses that look like vests over collared shirts with skirts, but are in fact a single garment. “I really approach knitwear from an outsider perspective,” she said at a preview in her studio, where her entire team wore head-to-toe Cormio, from the aforementioned one-piece dress to wide wale corduroys and a sweater vest. “The dress I love, because it’s like a costume or a uniform, just one thing you have to put on but you are dressed,” she said.
That simplicity and ease of wear carries into her popular pouf-sleeved knits made with hand-embroidered flowers and slip dresses with transparent keyhole window panes with tiny embroideries. Cormio and her team spent weeks hand painting tights to wear with some looks, and she pushed herself to make ’70s-tinged outerwear, knit plaid miniskirts, and even a teensy little pair of Lederhosen shorts. “It’s so literal,” she said, smiling at the petite trousers, “but I couldn’t help it.”
That sense of childlike indulgence, following one’s heart and passions, is what draws contemporary guys and girls to Cormio’s designs. In a world of too-serious and too-sad news, her clothing embraces the warm memories of a European past.
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