What If Luxury Design Started with the Material?

During Milan Fashion Week, on 25-26 September, Kering’s Material Innovation Lab and S|STYLE presented Wardrobe Edition 2026 at Kering Italia’s headquarters on Via Senato. Curated by Giorgia Cantarini, the project brought together ten international emerging designers to reinterpret the contemporary wardrobe using next-generation materials. It was presented as a collective walk-in closet, and it deliberately crossed product categories: ready-to-wear designers were asked to create bags, while footwear and accessories specialists developed complete looks. Across the collection, designers worked with non-leather alternatives, biotech fibres such as mycelium-grown and fermented protein materials, recycled content and inputs linked to regenerative agriculture. Material experimentation was treated as part of the creative process, and in doing so, the project highlights one of fashion’s harder problems: how material innovation moves from technical possibility to creative application and, eventually, to desire.

Our View: From material substitution to material identity

Much of fashion’s material innovation has been framed around substitution. Can a new material match the softness of leather, the drape of silk or the consistency of a conventional textile?

The approach has obvious practical advantages. A material that behaves like a familiar one fits more easily into existing products, manufacturing systems and customer expectations. But it also makes the existing material the benchmark. When innovation is measured mainly by how closely it reproduces something we already know, an unfamiliar material’s differences become technical shortcomings to eliminate, rather than creative characteristics to explore.

Wardrobe Edition points to another possibility: starting with the material instead of introducing it once the product has already been imagined. The question then changes. Designers stop asking “how closely can this behave like something we already use?” and start asking “what can this material let us create that existing materials cannot?” Its structure, tactility, rigidity, translucency and irregularity, even its limitations, become creative inputs. They can shape silhouette, construction and surface treatment and, over time, an aesthetic language specific to the material itself.

What makes the project particularly interesting is that Kering and S|STYLE applied the same principle beyond materials. By moving designers out of their established categories, they disrupted familiarity twice: in what the designers worked with, and in what they were asked to make. The broader lesson is that constraints become productive when they force designers to question inherited ways of working.

For luxury, this matters. The materials we now consider inherently luxurious did not earn that status through physical performance alone. Leather, silk, cashmere and precious metals have accumulated meaning through generations of craftsmanship, design, scarcity, cultural association and storytelling.

Emerging materials have not yet had that time. Their greatest opportunity may therefore lie not in becoming ever more convincing versions of established luxury materials, but in developing identities of their own. That takes more than material science. It needs designers to experiment with them, craftspeople and manufacturers to develop new techniques around them, brands to build compelling products with them, and customers gradually to recognise and desire the material language that results.

This is why initiatives such as Wardrobe Edition matter beyond sustainability. They treat the designer as a participant in shaping what an innovation becomes, not simply as its end user. The material developer learns what creative application demands; the designer discovers possibilities and limitations that a sample swatch never reveals; and manufacturing knowledge develops alongside both. Over time, that exchange is what can turn a technical innovation into a creative vocabulary, and it may prove critical to adoption.

The next generation of luxury materials may not need to disappear convincingly into the categories they were created to replace. Their difference could become part of their value.

Strategic Implication:

For luxury brands, material innovation may need to enter the creative process before the product is fully defined, rather than arriving mainly at the material-selection stage. That means closer collaboration between creative teams, material innovators, craftspeople, manufacturers and product development from the outset.

Doing so offers three advantages.

More distinctive design. Unfamiliar material properties can inspire new silhouettes, construction techniques, textures and finishes, rather than reproductions of established ones.

Material identity. Repeatedly developing recognisable applications around an emerging material can gradually give it aesthetic and cultural meaning, instead of positioning it indefinitely as an “alternative” to something else.

Faster learning. Designers working with an innovation while it is still evolving expose both its possibilities and its limitations early, giving material developers feedback they can act on.

Wardrobe Edition’s decision to move designers beyond their usual categories carries a wider lesson. Innovation can require deliberately disrupting established creative workflows: giving teams permission to experiment outside familiar materials, categories and construction methods before commercial requirements narrow the possibilities.

For brands investing in next-generation materials, the opportunity is therefore larger than replacing one material with another. It is to develop the design language, craftsmanship and cultural meaning that could eventually make an unfamiliar material desirable for what it is, rather than for what it successfully imitates.

Strategic Question: Could the next generation of materials also create the next generation of luxury design codes?

Source: Vogue; Vanity Fair Italia; A Shaded View on Fashion; Grazia Italia