For Spring/Summer 2027, Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi enter a world where a garment can behave like a painting and color can carry the emotional weight of a memory. Titled Cromie e Memorie, the new Aquilano.Rimondi collection turns its gaze toward femininity as portrayed through art, drawing together the decorative intensity of early 20th-century Vienna and the poetic visual language associated with Japanese dress.
Photo credit: Piero Biasion
Presented during Milan Fashion Week, the collection unfolds through two seemingly familiar foundations of a woman’s wardrobe: the shirt and the skirt. In the hands of Aquilano and Rimondi, however, familiarity becomes an opportunity for transformation. Layers accumulate, proportions shift and surfaces acquire depth, allowing these essential pieces to move beyond their conventional definitions.
Photo credit: Piero Biasion
The starting point is Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, particularly the atmosphere surrounding the Vienna Secession. Founded in 1897, the movement became closely associated with Gustav Klimt and a generation of artists seeking greater artistic freedom. Ornament, sensuality, symbolism and the female figure occupied a powerful place within this cultural landscape, while boundaries between fine art, architecture and decorative design became increasingly fluid.
Photo credit: Piero Biasion
Cromie e Memorie enters that territory through mood rather than historical reproduction. Klimt is an unmistakable presence within the collection’s artistic universe, yet Aquilano.Rimondi looks beyond the most celebrated name of Viennese modernism, finding inspiration in the broader visual vocabulary of artists whose work explored femininity through expressive color, decorative pattern and psychologically charged imagery.
Photo credit: Piero Biasion
That interest translates naturally into print. Patterns appear less like surface embellishment than fragments of an imagined canvas, carrying the intensity of painting onto the body. Color arrives in confident fields, while ornament becomes inseparable from construction. The result is a wardrobe conceived through composition: line, volume, texture and pigment working together to determine how each silhouette is read.
Photo credit: Piero Biasion
A second current runs through the collection, inspired by the cinematic world of Memoirs of a Geisha. Rob Marshall’s 2005 film, adapted from Arthur Golden’s novel, remains memorable for its highly considered visual universe and Academy Award-winning costume design by Colleen Atwood. Aquilano. Rimondi absorbs its sense of ceremony and atmosphere while avoiding straightforward costume quotation.
Photo credit: Piero Biasion
The kimono becomes particularly significant as an idea of volume. Rather than reproducing its traditional form, Aquilano and Rimondi study the possibilities suggested by its architecture: the relationship between body and fabric, the eloquence of layering and the way a silhouette can acquire presence through proportion rather than exposure.
Photo credit: Piero Biasion
That approach is especially visible in the dialogue between shirts and skirts. Airy shirts meet skirts with greater substance and tactile presence, establishing a rhythm between softness and structure. One layer slips over another; fabric moves around the figure; volume is built, interrupted and rebuilt. The body remains central, yet the clothes do not simply trace it. They frame it through textile architecture.
Photo credit: Piero Biasion
Layering has long been part of Aquilano and Rimondi’s creative vocabulary, alongside their interest in technique, precise construction, fabric research and proportion. The designers began working together in the late 1990s and later established Aquilano. Rimondi after experiences that included 6267, Malo and Gianfranco Ferré. Their namesake label made its Milan runway debut with the Spring/Summer 2009 season, establishing a design language deeply engaged with craftsmanship and the possibilities of cut.
Photo credit: Piero Biasion
Nearly two decades after that debut, Cromie e Memorie finds the designers returning to themes particularly suited to their sensibility: art, construction, material richness and the expressive possibilities of the female silhouette.
Yet there is something deliberately intimate about Spring/Summer 2027. Its cultural references are expansive, stretching from fin-de-siècle Vienna to the visual codes of Japanese dress and cinema, but its wardrobe is distilled around two elemental pieces. That tension gives the collection its character. A shirt can become an exercise in transparency and movement. A skirt can establish weight, shape and rhythm. Together, they create silhouettes that feel assembled through gesture, almost as though clothing were being painted directly around the body.
Photo credit: Piero Biasion
The title Cromie e Memorie—colors and memories—captures this approach beautifully. Here, color is more than seasonal decoration. It becomes an emotional device, capable of suggesting something remembered rather than merely seen. Prints carry traces of another artistic era without attempting to recreate it, while kimono-informed volumes evoke a cultural silhouette through abstraction and construction.
SpringSummer27 fashion show in Milan
Aquilano.Rimondi’s Spring/Summer 2027 woman consequently emerges through layers. She is sensual without being reduced to a single definition of sensuality, decorative without allowing ornament to overwhelm form, and sophisticated in a way that comes from the relationship between fabric, movement and the body.
Photo credit: Piero Biasion
There is a painterly quality to the entire proposition. One can imagine the collection as a sequence of canvases in motion, with shirts supplying translucency and light, skirts introducing density, and prints establishing passages of visual intensity. The runway becomes a place where memory is reconstructed rather than faithfully reproduced.
That may be the most compelling idea within Cromie e Memorie. Aquilano and Rimondi treat inspiration as something fluid. Vienna is remembered through color and ornament. Japanese dress is approached through proportion and layering. Cinema contributes atmosphere. Painting contributes emotion. Fashion ultimately gives those memories a new physical form.
