Graffiti Artist Dumbo Designs Streetwear Capsule Collection
MILAN — After a couple of decades championing the clash between fashion and the streets, graffiti artist Ivano Atzori, best known as Dumbo, is having a fashion gig of his own.
Called Milano Imperfecta, the streetwear capsule collection is the result of a collaboration between Atzori and Iuter, one of the pioneers of Italian streetwear.
The capsule is highly intertwined with Milan's iconography, elevating the conversation the graffiti artist has had with the city since tagging its street as a “teenage vandal,” as he describes himself, and getting art credit.
“I grew up in a city where the luxury, opulence and elegance of the center gave little consideration to the intellectual inertia, the neglect and the absence of culture found in the outskirts,” Atzori said. He is best known for his “buffed” or erased “Dumbo” sign, seen across the city's walls.
“This polarization served as both my motivation and my education. I have always kept valuable things from the margins of the city with me. Simultaneously, I aimed at appropriating, often without asking, anything that fascinated me from the center,” he added.
In 2001 he masterminded, alongside Federico Sarica, currently head of editorial content at Italian GQ, the King Kong store, a hotbed for street culture and fashion in the city where many creatives, such as Marcelo Burlon and Giorgio di Salvo, gravitated toward. Atzori is currently based on the island of Sardinia, Italy, where he runs his creative studio Pretziada.
“Iuter had the courage to listen to me and then put all of their talent and knowledge at my disposal. Iuter is peripheral for some; for many others it is central,” he said noting how the brand, which marked its 20th anniversary last year, was the force behind countercultures becoming mainstream in Milan. “As a company, Iuter is the demonstration of how energy and vision can create something that dismantles and surpasses static concepts of geography and marginality,” he said.
The artist's signature “Dumbo” sign becomes a pattern splashed on hoodies and T-shirts, sometimes superimposed on pictures of the city's subway's carriages by photographer Lele Saveri. The latter appears on a virgin wool formal suit reinvented for the workwear- loving generation, while graffiti signs grace half of a Japanese twill trenchcoat, a signature bourgeois garment that exemplifies Atzori's penchant for juxtaposing high and low.
Among the standouts, a garment- dyed pocketed jumpsuit mingles with vests and cargo shorts, as well as T- shirts bearing slogans including “in strada nessun algoritmo,” which translates into “no algorithm on the street,” and “you have to be good to be loved, but great to be hated.”
Available at Iuter and street retailer Slam Jam, the collection retails between 30 and 35 euros for balaclavas and baseball hats, respectively, and 1,000 euros for the suit. The trenchcoat retails at 450 euros while hoodies come in at under 150 euros.