Portrait
Fin de siècle, 1896, IVO MILAN didn't exist.
It was a strenuous commercial endeavor involving carts and distant fabric sourcing. There was Bellino, and then, in the early twentieth century, Modesto. A typical, tough story of Italian peddlers.
People who brought seriousness and dedication, interspersed their trade with recurrent and compulsory calls to arms, with the sole aim of returning to their families, ensuring their future and laying the groundwork for each child to open their own business.
IVO MILAN - first shop in Rovigo, 1940
Late 40s, early 80s, Ivo's time, the son most specialized in sourcing fabrics, trousseaus, early ready-to-wear, weddings and brides, gifts to make a good impression, and the first social well-being.
«That quality fabric lasts over time.»
«That one must know every fiber well, understand its development according to the physicality of the wearer, its performance and durability.»
Fabrics are not all the same: it depends on how you observe them and how much you have been able to experiment with them, and, not least, on an intuition that can predict their behavior with use thanks to the delicate balance of warp and weft.
Price clashes were a daily occurrence, the haggling of an emerging clientele facing the great Italian manufacturing industry.
IVO MILAN was born, the pride of a humble entrepreneur who, from a bicycle peddler hunting for elusive raw materials, managed to open his first shop.
Orlando e sua moglie Marisa
Late sixties, early seventies, Orlando – Ivo's son – in the midst of the economic boom, tired of continuous demands and exhausting price negotiations, shifted his focus entirely to Italian and French prêt-à-porter.
In the full swing of the 1968 revolution, with unprecedented music and aesthetic impulses, and an explosive pace of professional possibilities, Orlando steered IVO MILAN towards the most avant-garde expressions of Made in Italy and introduced major French brands.
With his wonderful wife, Marisa, and staff enthusiastic about the new direction, he lived and anticipated every trend: Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, Fendi, Yves Saint Laurent, Byblos, Jean Paul Gaultier, etc., became experiences for a more demanding public, a new clientele who believed that clothing could be synonymous with expressive differentiation and a conquest to be desired.
IVO MILAN — Emporio Armani, Rovigo shop
IVO MILAN - lookbook by Giorgio Armani S/S 1982
IVO MILAN began to define itself with a strongly innovative identity.
As soon as a designer reached the peak of their fame, becoming recognized by a wider audience, their destiny within the store was sealed.
Formal repetition became a decisive factor in abandoning collaborations; the creeping boredom within the staff and the lack of wonder and amazement upon new arrivals sparked reflections that fueled continuous research into new aesthetics, shifts in direction, and fresh proposals.
The embrace of Romeo Gigli, with a feminine poetics in stark contrast to Armani's essential austerity, accelerated the company's unstoppable and irreversible pioneering approach.
These transitions were never painless, marked by the inevitable conformist skepticism of those wary of novelty. There were defections of long-standing clients, but also more open new-comers, ecstatic at these never-before-seen items, capable of making a small provincial town a pole of attraction for those who wanted to stay updated and see the absolute debut of every new prêt-à-porter language.
The shop was still in Rovigo and developed across 3 departments: women's, men's, and the so-called 'Emporio,' aimed at a younger clientele, acquired through the experience of Emporio Armani — the second to open in Italy — and then transformed into a channel for experiments and less formal lines, from G-gigli, to Kenzo Jungle, from Michiko Koshino to Kansai Yamamoto, etc.
IVO MILAN - Rovigo, womenswear shop window, Romeo Gigli 1986
An experience that needed to be constantly justified.
And so, window displays always on the verge of artistic challenge, which evoked the international atmospheres of the showrooms visited.
The constant invitation to read, an indispensable tool for taking that step forward that allowed for aesthetic emancipation from conditioning and conformism à la 'everyone does it,' and the books on display, the collaborations with city bookstores.
And paper communications, marketing always on the edge of literary provocation, where the commercial plan willingly ceded ground to the cultural.
And self-produced fashion shows.
All opportunities to share, to make those little-narrated worlds of clothing understood, both because they were still emerging and because they were increasingly out of line with the circuits of fashion seeking easy consensus, often snobbish and uncritical.
IVO MILAN - Padova, tribute window marking the centenary of René Magritte's birth, 1998
A journey that, with the relocation of the business to the city of Padua in 1996, increasingly intersected with that of the so-called Japanese school, from Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons — already in the shop in Rovigo — to Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and Junya Watanabe, Jun Takahashi/Undercover.
Designers capable of radical renewal from season to season, while maintaining a solid identity.
Interpreters of a fashion that is not reduced to mere business, but rather in continuous and uninterrupted tension towards change, innovation, and an aesthetic idea that, in its formal complexity, remains enduring over time.
IVO MILAN - Padua, Yohji Yamamoto's window, 2012
Radical Fashion
It was precisely in those years, specifically in 2001, that the Victoria and Albert Museum in London dedicated an exhibition to the most important exponents of these new stylistic approaches, aptly titled Radical Fashion, highlighting the disruptive element of a fashion deeply rooted in art and design, beyond time and seasonal deadlines.
Most of the protagonists of the exhibition were indeed the Japanese designers widely represented in the Padua store, along with the early Martin Margiela and Vivienne Westwood, with their anti-conformist and experimental languages, also embraced by IVO MILAN.
Due to the correspondence between the store's assortment, its guidelines in selecting brands to include, and the Victoria and Albert Museum's exhibition, Radical Fashion has become the natural accompaniment of IVO MILAN.
Having grown up in the shop within that typical family-business dimension where the core of every discussion revolves around work, Sari and Soili, daughters of Marisa and Orlando, represent the fifth generation of the business.
A firm legacy, despite the ups and downs faced by IVO MILAN and a bitter closure of the physical store in 2020. A suspension followed by the loss of historic names: Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Rick Owens, Comme des Garçons, inevitably absorbed by other boutiques in the city.
The reopening in 2022 of the historic Padua shop, at via Santa Lucia 73, was then followed, in 2024, by the relocation to the historic and noble village of via Altinate, at number 149, next to the city's oldest church, Santa Sofia.
IVO MILAN Radical Fashion - Padua, window in via Altinate, 2025
The two sisters, nicknamed «the IVE», continue the same pioneering spirit as always, constantly searching for 'what has never been seen before' on the premise that 'nothing should be standard,' everything must be different from what is usually seen.
New times and a less worldly everyday life than in the past have also shifted their research towards more understated perspectives, adapting to the present and to its ever-evolving needs.