Misilmeri (The resting place of the Emir)

At the heart of this collection lies a deep generational nostalgia for Sicilian identity. I was drawn to what Leonardo Sciascia calls the “Sicilian palimpsest”; the idea that Sicily is a land written over many times, its identity shaped by waves of conquest, migration, and memory. I sought to express this complexity, its darkness and light, through a refined men’s wardrobe. An undercurrent of nomadism informs the silhouettes, inspired by the Maghreb’s flowing forms as imagined in Fortuny y Marsal’s orientalist paintings, and echoed in the work of Sicilian photographers who capture the island’s shifting sense of time and place. Every fabric in the collection carries a story. I used rare textiles such as inherited pure cashmere, French striped cotton and silks from the corners of Marché Saint-Ouen. Military badges and regimental braid, found in a shuttered Old Kent Road wholesaler, were deconstructed from antique dress uniforms and reimagined with reverence and fantasy. Colour emerged organically through natural-dyeing and hand bleaching, drawing from the Sicilian landscape: wine-dark seas, pink-blushed sunsets, and violet night skies. Garments are subtly manipulated, wrapped, draped, and folded to create structure without rigidity, offering an emotionally resonant elegance.