Sunnei’s Spring Summer 2025 show is not simply a celebration of the brand’s tenth anniversary, but a conceptual exploration of time and its deconstruction
Words DOMENICO COSTANTINI
In a complex game of temporal references, founders Messina and Rizzo reinterpret the very notion of anniversary, canceling chronological linearity to build an experience in which past, present, and future merge into a fluid and open narrative. “Ten years feel like a hundred,” says the brand, revealing the ambition to transcend the limits of temporality and project itself into a continuum where aesthetic codes are continuously rewritten. The setting in the Galleria Lia Rumma, a sacred place of contemporary art, becomes the ideal context for this reflection. It is not just a fashion show, but a performance in which time is slowed down and the pace of the catwalk dilated, thanks to a soundtrack marked by beats reduced to 100 BPM. The very movement of the models, all strictly over 50, becomes an act of aesthetic resistance against the frenzy of youth in the fashion system, elevating the experience to a meditation on beauty and authenticity in old age.
The lines of the body and the movements of these subjects present themselves as bearers of stories and matured energy, overturning the very concept of fashion as a place of the ephemeral. From a stylistic point of view, Sunnei reconfirms its language with the use of primary colors and sculptural shapes, but in this collection, these elements seem to be charged with additional meaning, almost as if they were fragments of visual grammar that the designers want to perpetuate over time. The large volumes and structured fabrics become a reflection of permanence and transformation, where each piece is placed as a fluid object, capable of taking on new forms depending on the context.
This desire to solidify and at the same time destabilize its aesthetic codes is the true beating heart of the tenth anniversary: a manifesto of loyalty to its expressive universe that is not afraid to contradict itself and evolve. Also significant is the choice of accessories, such as the paper bag and shoes from the T100 Pelotissima line, created in collaboration with Camper. These functional objects become bearers of a deeper message, symbols of a desire to combine artisanal quality and creative experimentation, challenging the boundaries between luxury and accessibility. Particularly significant is the declared failure of artificial intelligence in contributing to the creation of the collection’s prints, a failure that the designers embrace as an act of resistance to technology and reaffirmation of human intelligence.
The decision to rely on Marylène Fantoni, Loris Messina’s mother, to create the faces becomes a poetic act of reclaiming roots, an intimate and subversive gesture against automation. This gesture conceals a subtle reflection: creativity cannot be reduced to an algorithm, but lives in failure, in error, in a return to the origin. The closing of the show, with the models lined up in front of the minimalist façade of the Galleria Lia Rumma, evokes a sense of suspension. In this tableau vivant, Sunnei looks out onto a future that it does not intend to prefigure, but that it welcomes with the same experimental openness that has characterized the brand since its birth. It is not a conclusion, but an opening: a gap in time through which designers look, not to predict, but to continue to create.
SUNNEI SS25’s foulards are available for purchase here.
