Secoli Fashion Show 2024
Face to face with Miriam Maggioni
Interview with emerging talent on the fashion scene
Who is Miriam Maggioni and what is she passionate about?
This question always makes me laugh because I think anyone would be embarrassed when asked to sum up their identity and history. Very simply, I was born in Brianza. Unfortunately, I don’t have any exciting or mind-blowing stories about my childhood or adolescence. I was lucky to be born in the right part of the world and in a family that has always educated me about others. I chose my creative path when I first went to arts high school. I was trained by professors who had previously been artists and this was decisive in my learning journey. Later on, I stopped studying arts to devote time to other subjects. But as they say, ‘you always come back to where you felt good’, and I found out about the Istituto Secoli through an article in the Corriere della Sera newspaper that my mum came across. My social side has always been uppermost and so I looked for a path that would allow me to express what drives me inside, so I decided that ‘knowing how to make clothes’ was my best tool.
What made you want to turn your passion into a career, and what made you decide to study at the Istituto Secoli in particular?
I’ve always been taught to recognise a greater strength in collective work, so I was looking for an artistic patch that moved away from individuality yet still involved a variety of people and professions. The fashion supply chain is vast and covers a myriad of different areas, and this fascinated me. I like the idea of working in an industry full of inconsistencies. I identified a lot with this characteristic.
What were the biggest problems you encountered while creating your first collection?
The biggest problems were mainly in finding a fun and ironic way of expressing a small fashion system based on the concept of reuse and that could still open up doubts, questions and perplexities at the same time. I didn’t want a spectacular, abstract collection. Instead I wanted to create an everyday, straightforward collection that would work and be able to cope with any rebuttal, kind of like a thesis.
What prospects do you see for your entry into the professional world of fashion?
I actually started working a few weeks ago. I wanted to get to know the fashion business up close, to be in daily contact with those people who are the real fashion technicians. I wanted a space where we could use technical language and really learn the reality of things.