For Ilenia Durazzi, fashion needs time With The Atrium Show, the designer brings SS27 into a space inhabited by art, sound and performance

At a runway show, you have only a few seconds to take in a garment. That's enough to catch its silhouette, but less so to understand where its shapes come from or what happens when it meets other bodies, objects and languages. Ilenia Durazzi chose to start from that difference. To present SS27, she opened Atrium, the brand's cultural space in Milan, to an exhibition where the collection coexists with artworks, performances, sound and archival materials.

The Atrium Show does not place DURAZZI at the centre of every room. It brings together artists and creatives with their own independent practices and lets the proximity of their works and the movement of people through the space create connections. For Durazzi, this space was born from a desire to give voice to what surrounds the brand, as well as to the brand itself. It is a vision of culture that demands something very concrete: a place to meet and the time to do so.

«There is time for sharing with people, with creatives», she says. A physical space, especially one situated where the city flows through it, makes possible an exchange that might otherwise remain a mere intention. The runway show, as it stands today, feels too fast to convey the layered depth of her work. Atrium, by contrast, allows you to pause, return to a piece, discover a detail of the collection and watch how it changes over the course of the day.

The Fashion Lounge is perhaps where this choice becomes most apparent. The garments are not arranged as static pieces to be observed: they are worn, assembled and transformed through recurring gestures. The boundary between atelier, domestic environment and presentation becomes less defined. Elsewhere, an electric guitar enters into dialogue with flowers and chains, photographs of fragmented bodies are imprinted on marble, while archival voices and images bring distant presences back into the space. Each room retains its own character. Together, however, they speak the same language as the collection.

That language is called Assemblage. For SS27, Durazzi builds a wardrobe of elements that can separate, shift and take on different meanings when brought into relation with one another. The car coat and the caban feature removable collars, sleeves and linings. Shirts open along the sleeves and sides, releasing volume and revealing the body. Prints layer sculptures, photographs, records, gloves and everyday objects, much as things accumulate on the surfaces of a studio before finding a new form.

Durazzi also reads this method as a reflection of the present. «We are constantly contaminated by information, things, disciplines», she says. For her, assemblage gives visible form to this condition. Within the wardrobe, however, accumulation does not become confusion: each piece retains its own identity, and the precision of the construction holds the result together.

This is where the collection finds its most compelling tension. The tailoring follows the body with rigour, then breaks open into apertures inspired by the equestrian world. Silk satin catches the light alongside porous canvas and transparent layers; nappa and lightweight suede cling like a second skin. Metal plaques, buckles and leather details mark the silhouettes with a more assertive presence. This is not a contrast between discipline and sensuality: it is the way in which one makes the other more visible.

«For me, tailoring is not the jacket with the lapel», Durazzi explains. It is the care with which a garment is constructed around the anatomy, the ability to follow and enhance the body. Even when experimenting, the designer returns to the codes that have defined DURAZZI since its founding in 2022: tailoring, equestrianism, saddlery and leatherwork. These are foundations she wants to preserve, while continuing to seek new ways of making them relevant.

The same continuity guides Atrium. Durazzi does not envision it as a project disconnected from the brand, even though it may host initiatives that have nothing to do with a collection or with fashion. The ambition is for the space to welcome different audiences and conversations without having to reduce everything to a product. It is also the point at which a brand's credibility — when it claims to participate in culture — is truly tested: in its ability to sustain these relationships over time.

Four years after the founding of DURAZZI, Ilenia does not consider the definition of her language complete. She wants to strengthen its codes so they become recognisable, while continuing to push them forward. The Atrium Show gives shape to this ongoing research: garments can be opened and reassembled, works remain independent even as they enter into dialogue, and the space shifts with whoever moves through it. To understand what holds it all together, this time, you need to allow yourself more than just a few seconds.