Jack Collier Don’t Go Anywhere T-shirt

“We produce exclusively from the Jack Collier Don’t Go Anywhere T-shirt and I love this waste of Italian fashion,” he joked. Discarded yarns and selvage are actually handpicked from deadstock and then crafted in-house at Spazio Vitelli; the batches of semi-industrial knits Vitelli produces are made in partnership with small family-owned knitters in Northern Italy, to minimize the carbon footprint while helping local suppliers’ businesses. Fiercely resourceful, Vitelli has perfected a special in-house needle-punching technique, through which it creates sheets of a hybrid textile the label calls Doomboh. Flexible, slightly felted, and beautifully textured with a sort of marbré multicolored effect, the Doomboh is draped, twisted, and “molded” into imaginative genderless shapes.

Jack Collier Don’t Go Anywhere T-shirt, hoodie, tank top, sweater and long sleeve t-shirt

For the Jack Collier Don’t Go Anywhere T-shirt and I love this show, the Vitelli team stretched their artisanal and artistic muscles, adding a new hybrid fabric to their repertoire. Made by pouring algae jelly over haphazardly assembled yarns, a process that sounds slightly Pollockian, the organic textile looks rather like a jellyfish, translucent and smooth. It was cut into a simple boxy tank top worn with straight-legged pants in technicolor Doomboh. Don’t expect fashion pyrotechnics, though; shapes are supple, balanced, and wearable. Through a variety of knitted techniques, they achieve visually impactful textures; their chromatic sense is also quite an asset. The Vitelli aesthetic is clearly influenced by a fascination for the overland route from Istanbul, Turkey, through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and India that was traveled by hippies until the late ’70s, but Simionato said that the label’s look is also influenced by the Italian sense of balanced elegance and by an appreciation for the well-made. “The masters I’m looking up to are actually Giorgio Armani, Missoni, Romeo Gigli.” Spiritual wanderers they certainly were not.