SPFW N60: Dario Mittmann

At the 60th edition of São Paulo Fashion Week, Dario Mittmann reaffirms his position as one of the most restless voices in contemporary Brazilian fashion. With the collection “MONOPOLY: YOUNG MONEY!”, the designer proposes a visual and conceptual critique of late capitalism and of the power structures that shape the imagination of fashion, turning the board game Monopoly into an aesthetic battlefield between old money and new money. The result is a runway-city, a three-dimensional board where camp and pop subversion meet to rethink what it means to “win” in a saturated system of consumption.

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The show is structured as a playful and provocative narrative. Thirty looks parade over a board rebuilt as an imagined São Paulo, with squares named in Portuguese and digital projections that widen the immersion. The set design, ironic and grand at once, turns the audience into a player. Each model is a piece in movement, a metaphor for the contemporary subject caught between ambition and excess.

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Shirts with ties in the same texture, trousers that fuse denim and tailoring, tie-belts and bags that mimic black cards build a wardrobe of calculated irony. These are clothes that question, with humour, the traps of traditional elegance. Trainers shaped like slippers and robotic elements complete the equation, scrambling the codes of luxury and comfort, of seriousness and play.

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Rather than caricature, Mittmann does not ridicule the system, he performs it. The collection is not only fashion: it is a reflection on desire, on conquest and on the circulation of symbolic capital. The game of dressing is the game of power itself. Dario combines 3D printing, digital printing and hand embroidery, balancing technology with the human touch. The collaboration with Repreve and Santista, which supply fabrics recycled from PET bottles, introduces a sustainable and experimental angle. Luxury, here, is not in the shine of metallics, but in the idea of recycling symbols and materials.

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RUNWAY IMAGES 

Credits: Gabriel Cappelletti/ Marcelo Soubhia / Marcelo Soubhia /Ze Takahashi @agfotosite