Connecting Cultures presents Fashion as Social Energy, the first exhibition in Italy devoted to the relation between Art and Fashion, elaborated and interpreted by 14 leading Italian and international artists engaged with this exciting and vital topic.

This is an exhibition that deals with life, pivoting on the notion of fashion as a driver of relations and a different way of seeing oneself in relation to the world. The visitor is accompanied along an itinerary exploring values and new sensibilities that go well beyond apparel and ornament, desire and social distinction.

From 29 May to 30 August, the splendid rooms of Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine will host the pioneering work of some of the foremost avant-garde artists, ambassadors of a new perspective and a different lifestyle. They include Lucy Orta, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Maria Papadimitriou, Claudia Losi, Marzia Migliora and Luigi Coppola, Rä di Martino, Wurmkos, Kateřina Šedá, Mella Jaarsma, Kimsooja, Otto Von Busch, Andrea Zittel and Nasan Tur. The new and disconcerting itinerary of the show features an alternation of installations, videos, clothes and photos of staggering importance, some of them original and produced specially for this exhibition. The central topics of the show address issues central to our time: mobility and migration, ethnic cross-breeding, the power of suggestion of images, mobility and self-sufficiency, the individual dimension and its real possibility of expression. These are all open questions that affect the role of clothing as a powerful means of channelling values and mechanisms of inclusion or exclusion. Fashion as social energy, and art as a catalyst form, a trailblazer for the future.

The exhibition is curated by Anna Detheridge, visual arts critic and theorist and President of Connecting Cultures, and by the art historian and international curator Gabi Scardi. The issues of the show will also be addressed in meetings, performances and convivial evening events which will enliven Palazzo Moran­do throughout the three months that the exhibition is open to the public. The show and the collateral events are organised by Connecting Cultures, in collaboration with the Milan City Council, with the sponsorship of Regione Lombardia and Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana and in partnership with Ermenegildo Zegna under the aegis of Expo in Città.