melampo

Grey Sheep

@melampo_milano

University

architecture_Politecnico Di Milano

How Alighiero Boetti would say, Lulù and Anna Poletti are names that deserve to be put in a canvas and then to be embroidered with colours.
Both born in Milan, Lulù in 1979 and Anna in 1981, they had a happy childhood playing hide-and-seek in their factory between tables, sewing machines and women workers, playing with the accessories of shirts, collecting buttons and fabric offcuts as if these were precious treasures.
When her toes finally arrived at the pedal of a professional Necchi or Dürkopp sewing machine, Lulù started sewing and unsewing, while Anna had a passion for scissors and paper patterns. It’s from that proof of freedom combining memory and know-how, that their way of designing took place.
After studying architecture at the Politecnico in Milan, Lulù attended a still photography course at the Accademia Teatro alla Scala and began working with Italian and international photographers.
Ever since she was at the high school, Anna spent her free time in the family business. She didn’t finish her economic studies preferring working full-time as product development manager, learning how to manage all production phases, from the sketch to the real dress.
Even if she fluctuated between architecture and photography, Lulù always remained faithful to the imaginary of her origins and to the laboratory where she had grown up. And when she chose to follow the path traced by her family, she was charged of starting up a new manufacturing plant in India, which was a crucial experience in her education.
Between 2013 and 2014, Lulù and Anna decided to make their dream become true, giving new life to the brand of berets that belonged to their history by turning it into a new total look brand in the cultural landscape of contemporary fashion.
Theirs is an inventive partnership not only for biological reasons, but because it’s based on difference and complementarity: a precise work of dismantling, reshaping and smoothing, with the Lulù’s exuberance and the Anna’s simplicity.
What remains is what they both like

Latest Collection

Spring Summer 2017

Orientalisms and dreamlike visions from pan-Asian cultures. The research is like a train
of thoughts travelling from East to West. Cross-contamination on a trail of hunches that runs through a creative feel between Berlin, Tokyo and Milan.
The photograph of a tattoo on a female bare back is triggering unexpected relations
and a natural evolution. Tattoo culture as ancestral ritual and body decoration become a virtual moodboard for a story that starts from the actual design to the placed print and embroidery. An encounter with a Japanese tattoo artist who managed to dash the intangible and visionary insights with fluid ink, making them real and accurate. Dragons and geishas, paintings
on the body that you can actually wear.
A new vision of fashion, a design methodology that requires both a deep technical knowledge and an artistic approach, to adapt the patterns to the shirt, the brand's iconic garment.
Prints, patches, embroidery. An ethnic approach limited to decoration, filtered by the brand’s aesthetics. A street-style Victorian-inspired androgyny tainted by the Japanese anime culture: a men's shirt as the origin of the project. Lace, embroidery, shirt whose shape define the silhouette but also the mood. A warrior woman, a female samurai.
The archetypes: the male shirt, the boxy shirt, the painter shirt. Produced exclusively with high end Italian fabrics. Cotton Poplin, silk and cotton muslin, silk crepe, lurex, satin, Mikado, Chantilly lace, Macramé embroidery. The palette is bright in gold, silver and sky blue.
It's dusty with blush, pale blue and lilac hues. A splash of tattoo colours: hints of fuchsia, turquoise, orange and red.