Design students exhibit at Lineapelle in Milan

The exhibition (Re)sources/(Hi)story/Project(ed) was the culmination of an international collaboration, where students from all five of the school’s bachelor programmes explored Baroque aesthetics through a modern design perspective.

Unique collaboration
The collaboration emerged in spring 2024 when Christine Jeanneret, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen, invited Kolding School of Design to work alongside Silvano Arnoldo, an Italian fashion and costume designer, and Brad Carlton Sisk, an American Baroque theatre director and PhD researcher. With Lineapelle – an international trade fair for high-end leather producers – as a partner, the project received both funding and materials for the students’ work.

The ambition was to link industry, research, and education to strengthen knowledge exchange and expertise while creating new creative opportunities. The brief for the students was to develop modern and sustainable interpretations of theatre costumes for characters from the well-known 18th-century opera Alessandro nell’Indie. Over five intensive weeks leading up to Christmas, they worked across disciplines to rethink the Baroque's formal language and power dynamics in a contemporary context.

Exhibition in Milan
The results were so impressive that 11 projects were selected for a major exhibition at the Lineapelle fair, designed by Silvano Arnoldo. The finished projects demonstrate how a flexible yet focused approach to material use and combinations can revive techniques traditionally associated with leather goods and theatre costumes.

- The students have impressed with their ability to collaborate across disciplines. The artistic level has been exceptionally high, and their innovative approach has truly created something unique. At the same time, the interaction between Baroque opera characters and the students' ability to interpret and convey atmosphere through materials and form has generated an exciting dynamic, enriching the process and leading to innovative results, says Helle Graabæk, head of the Textile Design programme.

For the students, participation was not only an opportunity to present their work but also to gain valuable insight into the international fashion and design industry. In Milan, they had the chance to network with potential collaborators, future employers, and Erasmus+ internship providers.

As an added bonus, the exhibition will travel to Orsoni’s headquarters, where it will be showcased during this year’s Venice Film Festival.

- The whole process of teaching and preparing the exhibition has been a wonderful form of outreach. The possibility for the students to exhibit their creations in an amazing setting at Lineapelle, the most important international fair in Milan last week and soon in Venice at Orsoni’s furnace, a manufacturer of crafted Venetian smalti and mosaics, has been a wonderful opportunity and a great achievement. I believe that it has been an inspiring experience for the students and the Kolding School of Design to be in touch with the best Italian craftmanship, Italian culture and history; just as it has been enriching for our sponsors Lineapelle and Orsoni to discover young talents, Scandinavian sustainability and to promote them at the fair, says Dr. Christine Jeanneret.

- Thanks to a longstanding partnership with Lineapelle – a major backer of courses I taught at IUAV University of Architecture and Design in Venice and now of this edition of the Brand, Product and Communication course at Kolding School of Design – students not only have a chance to develop a materials-focused design methodology, but they also to start building relationships with suppliers of quality materials. This helps them learn respect for the materials and the craftsmen and companies that produce them. It is important that a designer be familiar with every part of the supply chain, which is why the collaboration with Italian industry leaders who donated materials for the course is such a wonderful opportunity for students to forge relationships that they can bring with them into their budding careers as design professionals, says Silvano Arnoldo.

- When the WoVen project brought together the "Italian team" – Silvano, an Italian designer, and Christine and I who have lived and done research in Italy for years – we were not sure how the Italian baroque would align with a Scandinavian design aesthetic. To our great surprise, we saw Kolding School of Design students really mix it up creatively, with out-of-the-box design solutions that really "pop", taking 18th-century concepts like the pannier, the corset, the moretta mask, and reinterpreting them in a fresh and truly theatrical way. It was also great to see how much the students connected to the psychology of the characters in the opera whose essence they tried to capture and "stage" in their design. Narrative and character have a cross-disciplinary appeal, so this course showed that the stories, the personalities, and of course the music in these operas can really spark creative design concepts that go in unforeseen directions, says Brad Carlton Sisk.

Process and Instructors
The design phase was facilitated by fashion and accessory designer Silvano Arnoldo, member of Women, Opera and the Public Stage in Eighteenth-Century Venice (WoVen) research group at NTNU in Trondheim, former professor at IUAV University in Venice and the European Institute of Design (IED) and Ferrari Fashion School in Milan. Opera history instruction was provided by experts from WoVen, which apart from Silvano Arnoldo includes Christine Jeanneret, Associate Professor at Copenhagen University, writer, curator and sound artist, and Brad Carlton Sisk, American theater director, former director of visual communications and Paris runway shows for Geoffrey B. Small Made in Italy, currently a PhD researcher in opera studies with the WoVen project at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway

The programme was developed in collaboration with the heads of the school’s five bachelor programmes: Helle Graabæk (Textile Design), Christel Arnevik (Fashion Design), Per Voss Nielsen (Industrial Design), Liv Eskholm (Accessory Design), and Laila Grøn Truelsen (Communication Design). Internal lecturers Barnabas Wetton (Communication Design) and Solveig Gubser (Accessory Design) acted as hosts and moderators throughout the course.

Throughout the project, students had access to the school’s workshops with professional guidance.

The course and exhibition were made possible with support from Lineapelle, in collaboration with Kolding School of Design, UNIFOR (The University of Oslo’s Endowment Fund), Orsoni Venezia 1888, and the following Lineapelle partners, who donated materials for the course: Bonaudo, Conceria Brotini Mario, Limonta 1893, Conceria Nuova Leon, and Ferdinando Albarello. Furthermore, Nordic Spoor, the sponsor of the school's Leather Studio, has generously donated materials.