Barbara Bologna treats fashion like an emotional ritual. In LA RÉVOLUTION — SUBVERSIVE GUARDIAN ANGELS, fragility, resistance, and distorted beauty collide in a world where clothing protects as much as it provokes.
In Barbara Bologna’s universe fashion is never treated as something merely wearable. Trained as a sculptor at Milan’s Accademia di Belle Arti and shaped by years in body art and performance, she has built a singular universe where oversized silhouettes, distorted prints, theatrical gestures and raw vulnerability collide somewhere between underground club culture and contemporary art.
Her latest collection, LA RÉVOLUTION — SUBVERSIVE GUARDIAN ANGELS, blends dystopian energy with spiritual symbolism, Bologna imagines guardian angels not as soft protectors but radical figures of resistance, wrapped in exaggerated silhouettes, distressed textures and emotionally charged layers. We caught up with Barbara to talk about if fashion has the power to disturb, protect and provoke.
Barbara Bologna portrait
Your background is art and your work crosses the line between fashion, art and something more spiritual. When did you realize clothing could hold that kind of emotional weight for you?
The time was very clear many years ago, when I was studying and making costumes for theatre and for my performances. I understood that constructing a garment did not simply mean dressing a body, but creating a presence. A garment can hold a wound, a memory, a desire. It can protect, deform, reveal. From there I started to feel fashion as something emotional and visionary.
Do you feel part of a fashion system, or more aligned with underground scenes and art spaces?
I am a neighbour to fashion, but a resident of art.
Growing up in Italy, what felt restrictive and what felt like a portal out?
Italy is a wonderful place. I never felt restricted there. I have always experienced the place where I was born as something that constantly feeds me visually, emotionally, spiritually. Italy is alive, full of art in every corner; you cannot stop dreaming.
One of my highlights every season is visiting your showroom during Paris Fashion Week; this past season you decided not to do it. Can you tell us a bit about that decision?
The world is changing and choices are changing with it. Wars and tensions bring human, emotional and commercial changes. My choice was to return to digital in order to develop this aspect better, to create a switch, a state of movement inside habit. The only sadness is not being able to hug people.
There’s a quietness to your idea of revolution, almost anti-spectacle. Do you think fashion has become too performative in how it frames rebellion?
Yes, I believe that rebellion is often staged more than it is lived. I think concept is always above aesthetics, emotions above shape. My revolution is simply direct: it whispers, it does not scream. Fashion is too saturated with too much and with too little.
Has your independence as a designer become a form of rebellion in itself?
Yes, absolutely. And I am proud of it. Being independent today means accepting a form of daily resistance. It is not as romantic as it may seem: it is complex, fragile, tiring. But it is also the only way I can protect the truth and uniqueness of my work. I do not want to produce only clothes. I want to build a language.
There’s a refusal to redeem or beautify the broken in your Fall/Winter 2026 collection. Is that a reaction against fashion’s obsession with perfection?
Yes. It’s an exploration of the idea of perfection, and of what we are ready to sacrifice for it.
Fashion knows this obsession very well. It knows how to turn a flaw into something to erase, correct, polish. I did the opposite: I am interested in fragility when it stays fragile, in a wound when it does not become decoration, in beauty when it does not ask for approval, but is simply understood for what it is.
If you put together a playlist for this collection, what would be on it?
I share here the link to the collection playlist, so you can discover it by yourselves. Music for me is always part of the emotional body of the collection, able to explain something that words cannot say.
“Stop apologizing for who you are” sounds simple, but it’s not. What does that actually cost?
It means accepting mistake, failures, defects. It means understanding that whoever is looking at you is not that important. It means forgiving pain, forgiving fear. It means stopping and breathing and deciding not to disappear anymore.
Do you ever feel like your prints are documenting something subconscious?
Yes, sometimes happen that I feel my prints beyond me and beyond reality. But one day I would like you explain it to me.
Your work resonates with people who sit slightly outside the mainstream. Who are you designing for right now?
I am designing for the world, for myself and for those who do not know yet.
What kind of world do you want your work to exist in?
In a healthy, peaceful and truly free world.
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