Milan has always had a gift for reinvention, and during Fashion Week this past February, one of its most quietly anticipated arrivals unfolded not on a grand runway but behind a street-facing window on Via Solferino 3. There, tucked inside ROBE ROBERTAEBASTA — the storied gallery store founded by Roberta Tagliavini in the bohemian soul of Brera — Monsieur Matteo Sorbellini officially planted his flag in the city with the inauguration of VIP ROOM, his concept store and poetic fashion universe.
The official opening fell on February 24, the first day of Milan Fashion Week, a deliberate and fitting debut for a brand that operates at the intersection of fashion, art, and storytelling. Four days later, on February 28, an intimate gathering brought together press, VIP clients, and industry insiders to mark the occasion with ceremony — an evening that felt less like a launch and more like a homecoming.
The meeting between Tagliavini and Sorbellini was, as the most meaningful creative collaborations often are, a natural convergence of sensibilities. Tagliavini has long positioned ROBE as a curatorial space where objects, garments, and ideas coexist with equal weight. Sorbellini, for his part, has spent years transforming VIP ROOM into something far more expansive than a retail concept — a poetic community, as he calls it, where fashion is a vehicle for narrative, vision, and play. Together, their alliance gave rise to a Milan outpost that feels entirely its own: theatrical yet intimate, referential yet alive.
The space itself is a world unto itself. Descending from the street-level window is an act of time travel, the surroundings evoking the downtown Manhattan of the 1950s and 1980s while simultaneously breathing the intellectual, bohemian air of Brera.
Amid iconic design furniture — among them the legendary Pratone by Gufram, that monumental grass-green sculpture that has anchored avant-garde interiors for decades — the clothes take on the quality of artworks in dialogue with their surroundings. The most immediately recognizable feature of the space is its commanding Caribbean blue room. Sorbellini selected this saturated, sun-drenched hue as VIP ROOM’s official signature color, a shade now woven into every label and every corner of the brand’s visual identity.
It was within this scenographic setting that Sorbellini unveiled BRERISSIMA, a Couture à Porter collection conceived exclusively for women and drawn from the refined, culturally rich spirit of the Brera neighborhood itself. The collection reads as an archive brought forward in time — a wardrobe for a woman who collects, who remembers, and who refuses to be ordinary. Three-dimensional floral bombers expand the silhouette with a lightness that belies their sculptural ambition.
Denim, traditionally casual and democratic, is elevated here with hand-applied crystals and panels of pure silk scarves. Unisex tailoring in the couture spirit of the 1970s is paired with the brand’s signature “Dinosauro” trousers, architectural and assertive in equal measure. The “Shibuya” shirts weave together Eastern romanticism and rigorous sartorial construction, landing somewhere between a love letter and a manifesto.
Throughout the collection, pure silks and taffeta — the Maison’s most emblematic fabrics — are reimagined as metropolitan trench coats, balloon-silhouette tops, and dresses with the kind of structural confidence that recalls couture’s golden age while remaining absolutely, urgently of the present. Limited productions and singular, one-of-a-kind pieces reinforce the brand’s commitment to contemporary couture, positioning each garment as something to be sought, cherished, and kept.
