A garment can be many things: protection, ornament, social signal, or private ritual. At its most compelling, however, it becomes a vessel for memory: a portable surface where histories, gestures, and identities remain in motion.
Retori, founded in 2024 by Salma Rachid, approaches fashion through precisely this understanding. The Made-in-Italy house does not organize its creative life around conventional seasonal terminology alone. Instead, its women’s and men’s ready-to-wear and accessories collections unfold as Chapters: seasonless narratives developed through dialogue with contemporary artists.
The premise is both simple and ambitious. Each collection begins not with a trend forecast, but with an encounter. An artist’s memories, cultural references, emotional vocabulary, and visual language become the foundation for silhouettes, color, texture, and atmosphere. Fashion is not merely inspired by art. It enters into conversation with it.
Retori summarizes its philosophy in a concise statement: “Retori translates the language of art into fashion.” The result is a brand identity built less like a traditional catalogue and more like an unfolding body of work.
The Organizing Principle of the Chapter
In an industry governed by accelerated calendars, Retori’s chapter model proposes a different rhythm. The brand presents collections as trans-seasonal episodes, released twice a year, allowing each narrative to develop with greater continuity and emotional depth.
This structure also changes the relationship between the house and its audience. A conventional collection can be consumed as a moment. A chapter asks to be entered.
The distinction matters. Retori’s clothes are designed to exist beyond a single season, while still carrying the atmosphere of a particular artistic encounter. Coats, tailoring, knitwear, dresses, outerwear, and accessories are given a narrative coherence that encourages the wearer to see individual pieces as part of a larger visual language.
The brand describes its garments as “created to be worn, collected and lived in.” The sequence is revealing. Wearability comes first, but collecting and living extend the object’s significance. A coat is not reduced to its material value; it becomes a marker of time, a memory of place, or a fragment from an artistic conversation.
The Radiance of Encounter
Retori’s first Chapter established the logic of this approach through the work of Diedrick Brackens and Daniella Portillo. Brackens, known for textile-based explorations of memory, identity, and belonging, brought a language of weaving and cosmographic abstraction into the conversation. Portillo’s chromatic investigations introduced another dimension: color as a form of perception, emotion, and worldview.
Together, their practices offered a productive tension. Textile and painting. Structure and atmosphere. Memory as something woven, and memory as something seen.
Retori’s debut collection translated these ideas into a substantial wardrobe of approximately 150 pieces, divided between womenswear and menswear. Tailored jackets, trench coats, reversible parkas, knitwear, midi dresses, and softer silhouettes were brought into an equilibrium between utility and introspection.
This is where collaboration becomes more meaningful than visual borrowing. The goal is not simply to print an artwork onto a garment or reproduce a recognizable motif. Instead, the artist’s perspective becomes an organizing principle. It influences the emotional temperature of the collection, the relationship between volume and the body, and the ways in which color moves across the wardrobe.
The difference can be felt in the finished object. A silhouette may appear restrained, yet carry the spectral quality of a remembered image. A textile may feel familiar, but its surface suggests a more complex history. The clothing leaves room for interpretation.
Belonging as a Fabric of Self
Chapter 02 continued Retori’s investigation through the work of Miko Veldkamp, whose artistic practice engages with identity, belonging, self-discovery, evolution, and change.
Veldkamp’s background: born in Suriname to Dutch and Indonesian parents: provided a particularly resonant foundation for a collection concerned with the construction of self. Belonging, in this context, is not presented as a fixed location. It is a process: layered, sometimes contradictory, and continually revised.
The collection translated this sense of movement into a visual theatre shaped by memories. Rather than offering a single definition of identity, Chapter 02 allowed multiple interpretations to coexist. This is one of the strengths of Retori’s method. The artist does not function as a decorative reference point; the collaboration creates a conceptual atmosphere in which clothing can ask questions.
What does it mean to carry several cultural languages at once? How does a person dress while moving between inherited histories and a self-authored future? These questions are abstract, but fashion gives them physical form. A jacket crosses the shoulders. A knit follows the architecture of the torso. A coat creates distance, protection, or presence.
Clothing makes philosophy tactile.
Sentimento and the Intelligence of Tenderness
Chapter 03, titled “Sentimento,” deepens the house’s commitment to emotional narrative through its collaboration with self-taught Brazilian artist Manuela Navas.
According to Retori, the chapter is “an ode to vulnerability and craftsmanship,” balancing structure and ease with “poetic balance and graceful intent.” Its central themes: tenderness, fragility, nostalgia, and invented memories: are not treated as sentimental embellishments. They become technical and material concerns.
The collection’s signature draped outerwear is reimagined in featherlight forms. The Retori coat, with its shawl collar, acquires a sense of bodily eloquence: it wraps, moves, and responds to the wearer rather than imposing a rigid silhouette. Tailoring is relaxed without losing precision. Linen suits, Saharan jackets, utilitarian vests, wraparound dresses, and artisanal knitwear create a wardrobe that is both functional and emotionally open.
The palette moves through sea-toned blues, turquoise, sun-aged browns, and soft sage. These colors do not shout for attention; they accumulate like brushstrokes across a canvas.
Navas’s work also expands the cultural habitat surrounding the collection. Her paintings explore labor, kinship, nature, and the bonds shaping Black and Brown communities in rural Brazil. In the Retori environment, the garments are presented alongside her work, allowing the collection to be experienced not simply as fashion but as a shared spatial narrative.
A Store Becomes a Cultural Room
This relationship between garment and artwork extends into Retori’s physical spaces. The brand’s Milan flagship, Salotto Retori, is conceived as more than a retail setting. It functions as an evolving platform for exhibitions, performances, workshops, and encounters.
That decision is significant because it challenges the separation between commerce and culture. In many retail environments, art provides atmosphere. At Salotto Retori, art and fashion are intended to operate as mutually enriching forms of expression.
The architecture becomes part of the narrative. Clothing is not isolated on a rack or reduced to a product image; it occupies a room with paintings, sound, bodies, and conversation. The customer becomes a viewer, and the viewer becomes a potential wearer.
This model resonates with a growing class of cultural consumers who want more than novelty. They are interested in provenance, process, and intellectual context. They may collect clothing in the same way they collect books, objects, or works of art: not because every item must function as an investment, but because each one can hold a story.
For these audiences, luxury is increasingly measured by depth. Craftsmanship remains essential, but so does the presence of an idea.
The Road Ahead, Written in Chapters
Retori’s developing sequence continues with Chapter 04, associated with Brazilian artist Gustavo Nazareno. His symbolically charged, theatrical practice: shaped by Catholic imagery and engagement with Afro-Brazilian spiritual traditions: opens another field of inquiry for the house.
Here again, the point is not to turn an artist’s biography into a superficial theme. It is to create a space where visual references, spiritual histories, and material craft can meet with respect and complexity. Dramatic chiaroscuro, ritual symbolism, and the tension between visibility and concealment offer fertile ground for a co-ed collection.
Retori’s chapter model ultimately proposes that fashion can function as a form of cultural dialogue without losing its practical purpose. A garment still needs to move, fit, endure, and accompany daily life. But it can also carry a question.
That is the universal thread running through Salma Rachid’s vision: identity is never finished, and neither is the wardrobe through which we express it. Each Chapter becomes a pause in an ongoing journey: a moment when art, craftsmanship, and lived experience reach an equilibrium.
Retori does not ask clothing to remain static. It asks clothing to remember, to listen, and to evolve.
For more on the house’s creative philosophy, visit Retori’s official story and explore Chapter 03: Sentimento. For a wider look at how fashion carries historical and artistic memory, read Davinci Magazine’s feature on Balenciaga couture and the weaving of past and present.
