Fashion designer Daniela Del Cima is considered in many selected circles both in Italy and abroad as Milan’s best-kept secret.
The owner of a successful creative space in the modern and trendy area around via Tortona, Del Cima receives in her atelier buyers and private clients, but also invites young designers to showcase their creations here.
Del Cima has been in the fashion business for a few years, but she actually comes from a very different background, like Nanni Strada she is indeed an architect. After opening her first shop in Forte dei Marmi, she realised she wanted to understand how the garments she sold actually worked and became a fashion consultant for different companies.
Her Spring/Summer 2011 womenswear collection is based around one colour - white - and it includes very affordable (starting from under €200) yet unique designs in fabrics reworked through technologically advanced techniques that form on the dress surfaces sculptural three-dimensional effects, bubbly elements and froissé motifs.
Del Cima tries to inject a little bit of timelessness in all her designs: her clients often tell her they never throw away her pieces because she tends to create designs that can be worn in any season.
One of Del Cima’s main inspirations remains architecture: all her designs are indeed based on strong and sculptural shapes. A while back, during Milan’s International Furniture Fair and the Fuorisalone, Del Cima even presented an installation that featured a selection of white dresses from her S/S 2011 collection. Highlighting the strong connections between fashion, interior design and architecture, the installation was an instant hit with the fair visitors.
Yet Del Cima doesn’t only conceive architecture as an inspiration for her silhouettes: such discipline, she claims, may even inspire an entirely new lifestyle for fashion designers as well.
Daniela Del Cima: When I was a young girl my mother always allowed me to get my clothes made. I realised only later on in my life how lucky I had been, because in this way I managed to express my creativity from a very early age. When I grew up I first attended the art school, then graduated in architecture. In the 70s it was almost impossible to work with an architect, so I decided to focus on something ‘easier’ and started designing clothes. I had a shop in Forte dei Marmi for a while and, thanks to it, I became independent and started travelling. After a while I realised I wanted to understand how the garments I sold really worked and became a fashion consultant for different companies. This job taught me a lot, first and foremost to be humble because in some cases I also had to take care of products that did not reflect my tastes and style. Yet I was lucky because I managed to work with textile companies, discovering how different fabrics helped a designer creating different shapes and silhouettes and understanding what it means to be a pattern cutter. It was then that I realised that one of the most important problems in fashion is wearability and that too often designers are locked up in their creative spaces, dreaming about an idealised woman who doesn’t really exist.
Daniela Del Cima: Many people conceive an atelier as an old fashioned place, because this word automatically conjures up visions of tailor-made pieces. Yet I strongly feel that an independent atelier with a small team may be a real solution for all those young designers who may never find a job in our saturated markets. Such a space may help young fashion designers understanding why a client wants to buy a garment. I created the Atelier Del Cima because I wanted to go back to the old-fashioned concept of the atelier as a space where a designer works on a daily basis on a product, but my creative space is open to buyers, private clients and to other designers who want to showcase their work and reach out to more people, establishing a contact with their customers and ‘testing’ in this way their creations.
Do you ever get inspired by your clients?
Daniela Del Cima: I’ve worked closely with different women for many years and I simply adore their fantasy and their will to discover new emotions every day. There are clients who turn up at the atelier at 9am for example and they amaze me because they must have spent the entire night thinking about a new dress and their joy and enthusiasm really inspires me and pushes me to constantly improve myself and do better.
Daniela Del Cima: The disciplines I studied definitely inspire me in my work. I really love simple yet strong and sculptural shapes. We are very lucky in Italy since we live in a sort of open-air museum and our eyes are constantly bombarded with beautiful things, we are surrounded by wonderful works of art that we often take for granted and that provide us with messages of harmony from different times and centuries and I’m always on the lookout for that perfect harmony between my fabrics and silhouettes.
What inspired the Spring/Summer 2011 collection?
Daniela Del Cima: I went to visit a Busto Arsizio-based textile company called Erica Industria Tessile since I wanted to feature in my collection a few printed designs, but my imagination was captured by the beauty of one of their textile lines called "Erica Studio" that features fabrics reworked through some amazing techniques. For example, one fabric had been heated through a technique called froissé that created on the surface of the fabric a wonderful three-dimensional effect because the heat burns the fabric, moulds it and eventually freezes it in this shapes; in another case the heat had produced on the surface of the fabric bubbly shapes that created bizarre volumes. I found all this very inspirational, so I decided to come up with an all-white collection employing these fabrics. One of the dresses, a sort of A-line dress in a froissé fabric has turned into the best selling design. The real secret of the collection though is that all the dresses have got a soul, since each of them is tailor-made with a range of different body types in mind.
Daniela Del Cima: As a fashion designer it’s really important to have an in-depth knowledge of fabrics, since every fabric has a story. I love cotton voile, that’s the thinner and most expensive cotton that is also used for the little shirts of newborn babies. Though difficult to work since it’s very thin, so it must be employed to create well-balanced shapes, cotton voile is a pretty fabric for summer and I always include in my collections shirts in this material characterised by soft lines. Another fabric I often use is stretch cotton poplin. Cotton poplin is mainly employed to make men’s white shirts and I love making shirt dresses using this fabric because men’s shirts are a must and it’s great to be able to reinvent such a wardrobe staple for women. I also use a lot of thin jerseys that help me creating layers, draped motifs and movements. I purposely avoid stretch jerseys because I don’t like extremely tight designs as I think the body lines should be emphasised but not exposed.
Daniela Del Cima: A garment is something that allows you to create beauty and when you wear it people shouldn’t tell you ‘What a beautiful piece you’re wearing’, but ‘You look beautiful!’, in a nutshell they should see you and not the dress. Opting for extremely trendy dresses only encourages consumerism, because, next year, after seeing the same design on other people so many times, you will want to throw it out. But if the dress becomes yours, if it turns into a part of yourself and or your personality, you can reinterpret it in thousands of ways for years to come. People often tell me they never throw away my pieces and that’s because I tend to create timeless designs that can be worn in any season. I use for example a lot of silk both in winter and summer, so that these pieces never need to be taken out of the wardrobe.
According to you, in which ways can the fashion industry get out of the crisis?
Daniela Del Cima: I can’t foresee what will happen in future, but looking around myself I see a lot of cheap and low quality products. I think one solution would be to start acknowledging beautiful and well-made pieces. Despite the crisis, I got a lot of people saying they like my work and a lot of buyers as well. At the Pitti trade fair I got a Chinese delegation that seemed amazed by one of the simplest dress from my Spring/Summer 2011 collection.
In which ways can architecture or interior design help or transform fashion?
Daniela Del Cima: In fashion there is a lot of rivalry and envy and I don't like that since I think there is space for everybody. I understand that it’s utterly annoying for a designer to create something and suddenly seeing bad quality copies of that design appearing on the market and yet I do feel we must all open up more rather than lock ourselves away in our studios. The International Furniture Fair and the Fuorisalone did an amazing job by inviting visitors to discover the world of design. This was a very important step forward because it educated the public, but it also helped interior design companies getting stronger. I think fashion designers should be braver and do the same, opening their studios, creative spaces, ateliers and catwalk shows to the public. In this way, through this sort of democratisation of fashion, people will get used to beautiful and high quality pieces and they will understand the difference between an original garment and a copy. As I said, one solution to the crisis is to start acknowledging beautiful things, but to make sure people do it, we must all start taking our responsibilities and educate consumers to quality. As much as it may sound hard to open our showrooms and find the time to talk to clients when we would maybe prefer to be working on our next collections, we must do an effort, because that special contact with a client may inspire us and allow us to understand if something we are doing is truly worth and eventually channel our inspirations into stronger products.
Daniela Del Cima’s Spring/Summer 2011 collection can be previewed from 13th September at the Atelier Del Cima, Via Tortona 14, Milan, Italy.
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