How Beyond Fashion brought a heritage brand and an indie designer together at MFW The collab between Napapijri and PDF by Domenico Formichetti was the first chapter of a new way of making fashion

This Milan Fashion Week FW25 Men’s was different from the others. More chill, lighter, shorter – with many big brands migrating towards co-ed shows during the next women’s fashion week, an unexpected advantage was the greater visibility enjoyed by younger and independent brands. Some of these opted for presentations, which this year served as a true meeting ground between historic brands and new voices, while others debuted on the runway for the first time. Among them was PDF by Domenico Formichetti, which had already experimented with the classic runway format through a concert-presentation during the last fashion week and officially debuted on the catwalk this year. One of the highlights of the show was the brand's collaboration with Napapijri, where Formichetti applied his youth-oriented aesthetic to some of the brand's classic pieces – most notably the iconic anorak. This union, currently limited to one-off pieces from the show, contributed on one hand to shining an international spotlight on PDF's presentation, and on the other, brought a historic brand like Napapijri to the forefront of experimentation and dialogue with new frontiers of design. This dialogue was the result of work by Beyond Fashion, nss magazine's program dedicated to the independent fashion scene and a shift in the sector’s storytelling – focusing on behind-the-scenes processes and the internal workings of the fashion mechanism rather than its more visible external aspects.

And Napapijri, as the first partner introduced to Formichetti's brand by Beyond Fashion, was the perfect name for this collaboration. With its unparalleled recognition, extensive distribution, and above all, its long history, the brand is not only rich in heritage and highly advanced in the technical research of fabrics, but it also forms a concrete part of people’s lives worldwide. Almost everyone in this part of the world has owned a piece of clothing by the brand at some point in their life – and it is precisely this familiarity, this democratic nature, that brought the major outerwear name and the independent PDF together. The result was the perfect hybridization of their respective languages, making the Napapijri pieces customized by Formichetti seen on the runway appear entirely natural. The meeting of voices and seemingly distant realities represents perhaps the best (but certainly not the last) outcome that the spirit behind nss's Beyond Fashion project could have hoped for. Only through such exchanges, through storytelling that uncovers all the truths behind the scenes of fashion, and through cross-sector dialogue between young and historic realities, can a shake-up of the traditional fashion system be achieved – a system that, this year, amid a crisis of sales and identity, has shown the world that the only path to saving itself lies in revolution.