The only knitwear MA with 160 textile companies built into the curriculum
How a school in Rome built one of the most unique programmes in fashion education.
By Giorgia Feroldi
Accademia Costume & Moda’s new building in Rome’s Rione Esquilino had been, in sequence, a luxury goods warehouse built at the turn of the last century, a discount store where everything cost a euro or two, and – because Roman designers stopped in when they needed fabric – an accidental resource for the city’s fashion world. When ACM completed its restoration – six-million euros, in conservation rather than renovation, which is how the original arches got found under decades of false ceilings – the students moved in. One floor below: the Biblioteca Fiamma Lanzara, named after Lupo’s mother, who ran the school from 2001 to 2020, holding Franca Sozzani’s personal collection of volumes, Isabella Rossellini’s signed books, the only institutional copy in Italy of an 1867 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, and the only library copy of the first Grazia, among others.
Fifteen minutes away by motorcycle – on a ride that easily channels La Dolce Vita – is ACM’s original building. Lanzara names it Hogwarts before arriving, owing to the portraits, the layered interiors, the costumes lining every hall, and especially the magic of a place where fashion has been taught since 1964. On the staircase, for instance, Rosana Pistolese – who founded ACM that same year by going to the Ministry of Labour to argue that fashion deserved the status of a university discipline and not a technical trade – is photographed with Indira Gandhi, who lectured here when she visited Rome.
Meanwhile, a few hundred kilometres north at the Modateca Deanna archive (named so for Deanna Ferretti Veroni) the tutors lead the way into a review. Simona Barbieri, who co-founded Twinset and teaches on the masters, moves through the room with a translator in real time, guiding each student toward what the archive can give their research that a moodboard cannot. Deanna herself observes from the other side of the desk. After six decades working with yarn, she has already identified who knows how to handle it and who is still learning – a glance is sufficient.
Lupo runs ACM alongside his brother Furio. He came in in 2009 – no background in fashion, and the school was down to a single course and 60 students – and has since built it to more than 500 students and 10 master programmes. The most distinctive of these is the Academic Master in Creative Knitwear Design, directed by Sonia Veroni, daughter of Deanna. The knitwear master runs between Rome and the archive in San Martino in Rio, where 60,000 garments are held.
Lupo, when you stepped in in 2009, what needed to change?
The framing, first. A school’s purpose is not to elevate itself but to elevate – those sound like the same thing, and they’re not. The institution had history, serious alumni, a founder who had understood 60 years earlier what fashion could mean as a discipline. But the direction had drifted inward. So I reoriented around the students as the only priority: knowing them, listening to them, understanding what happened to them after they left, whether they were finding work, what they were being hired for, whether what they’d learned matched what anyone actually wanted. The other change was structural: in 2010 I was calling the maisons and getting nowhere. While I was working out how to change that, I asked myself what fashion actually is. The maisons use the supply chain to make fashion – fashion is the supply chain. So I went to four textile companies [to collaborate] instead: they said yes immediately, because no school had ever approached them directly. From four we went to ten, then 17, now 160.
The Academic Master in Creative Knitwear Design is the programme you’re best known for internationally. How did it come about?
The relationship with Deanna Ferretti Veroni goes back through three generations – she worked with my grandmother in the ‘80s, then my mother, then with me. When her daughter Sonia built the masters, she had started it with a different partner. I looked at what she was building and thought: there’s no reason for anyone else to do this. We went to Modateca, Deanna kept us for three minutes in her husband’s office and said: speak to my daughter. We barely knew Sonia. We sat down together and it was immediate. The master belongs to ACM academically, it is our degree, but without Modateca it wouldn’t exist at all.