After first launching at MFW during the AW19 womenswear shows, Trussardi’s Archive+Now project has seen the Italian heritage label collaborate first with Giulia and Camilla Venturini of Medea and then with the anonymous duo behind Checking Invoices. 

Now launching its third instalment, the collaborative project sees designer Giorgio di Salvo join the line-up. The multimedia artist is previously known for collaborating on graphics for Marcelo Burlon’s County of Milan label as well as with Off-White with his own label United Standard that first launched in 2015. 

“The idea of collaborating with such a historical brand like Trussardi, so deeply rooted in my childhood and in the city of Milan, thrilled me from the beginning,” di Salvo tells us. “I started by doing in-depth research with the objective of discovering what the main characteristics and distinctive codes of the brand are.”

For his offering, the designer reworked the original 1973 logo and created tees and sweaters utilising leather the house is known for, as well as accessories with a metallic sheen inspired by the overheated muffler of a sports car. The sports car returns in the collection’s images, joined by artist Cali Thornhill DeWitt, who the designer first met in New York through a mutual friend. 

“Cali has an unyielding credibility in his cultural and artistic background and, at the same time, a perfectly recognisable face that speaks of a world I believe is cohesive with Trussardi’s vision of today and tomorrow,” di Salvo explains on his choice of model. The two collaborated again on a presentation at MFW, that saw the collection staged in a car park. 

Like his predecessors, di Salvo also praised Trussardi for the initiative of inviting upcoming creatives into its archive and letting them create a new vision. “Projects such as Archive+Now are important because they bring a freshness and new points of view to fashion, a world that usually lives in between complex dynamics weighted down by interests that have nothing to do with creativity,” he says. “These collaborations are always interesting as they relate different worlds and are the perfect birth-place of new realities.”