Spazio Meta and the second life of fashion show displays

What happens to the fashion show displays?In Milan there is a warehouse that collects them all, it's called Spazio Meta and it combines reuse and creativity

There Milan fashion week it's been over for a few weeks now and, if you want, you could take a piece of it home with you.In Milan it exists Meta Space, a place that recovers and sells fashion show displays.This is no small thing given that the setups for the shows, which in some cases are something similar to a film set, are created ad hoc and then simply discarded.The idea of ​​recovering them comes from three girls: Margherita Crespi, Martina Bragadin And Benedetta Pomini, who created Spazio Meta with a mission, that of collecting beautiful things from installations and scenography and giving them a new life.Creativity does not necessarily have to be exercised at the expense of sustainability, and these three girls are proving it with a hub from which other designers, screenwriters, stylists, but also curious people can find unique design pieces.

What Spazio Meta is and how it works

Spazio Meta, therefore, is a project dedicated to reuse and to the valorisation of materials and scenography created for ephemeral installations in the fields of art, fashion and design.Limiting waste and offering a sustainable alternative to the traditional production and consumption cycle is the rationale behind the warehouse inaugurated in Milan in 2021 in the Bovisa district, where the materials and scenography from salons, exhibitions, fashion shows and events they are collected, inventoried and finally displayed for sale to the public with solidarity tariffs that take into account their origin and their technical characteristics, as the three creators explain to us.

What happens when a brand has to create an installation for a fashion show?Are the settings created on purpose?
Obviously yes.Not only is each fashion show built ad hoc, but the human and economic effort behind it is truly unimaginable, with production teams planning, preparing and studying the implementation usually many months in advance.For each fashion show, sets and scenography are created specifically and the installation must not only reflect the collection and message of a brand, but in most cases it is designed to offer the public - whether real or virtual - an immersive experience and possibly unique.Hence the need to relate to these materials as a precious resource, whose intrinsic value cannot be considered simply on the basis of a single temporary use.

How many setups do you manage to recover on average during each Fashion Week?
Our recovery service has been active since January 2021.During this first year and a half of activity we have seen the collaborations with brands and fashion houses grow more and more - and with great satisfaction.On the one hand, all this has allowed us to expand our selection, increasing the volumes of recovered material, on the other it has allowed us to include in the inventory a large variety of materials that are very different from each other, but share an excellent
workmanship and quality.Having to deal with a physical space with its own characteristics, in order to absorb new material we must also be able to guarantee an outgoing flow that is as regular as possible.For this reason, in addition to doing everything possible to maintain an open and constant dialogue with our suppliers, in order to optimize communication and be informed in advance of their future projects and installations, we are committed to maintaining extremely supportive and competitive sales prices , in order to ensure a continuous turnover of material and effective redistribution and reuse of resources.

Reuse and creativity are your keywords, is it difficult to make people understand the value of using something "non-original"?
Originality is a complex discussion, made up of many nuances and critical issues.For a lifetime we have been accustomed to considering a new product as having its own a priori quality, an innate uniqueness or added value that is independent of the use to which it is intended.Everything has already been thought of, designed and produced.Everything has already been seen, chosen, photographed, instagrammed.Everything - and we are obviously speaking from a point of view linked to the field of ephemeral productions and installations - has already been used, and finally discarded, disposed of and often wasted.Discussing originality means walking on a very slippery surface.For our part, what we do every day with Spazio Meta is to try to reverse the perspective, offering an alternative solution to our suppliers as well as our customers.However special it may be, it is not so much the product we sell that is original, but the use we decide to make of it in a specific context.In our opinion, this means being creative, having talent and ideas, regardless of the ethical discourse behind it:opening up to the possibility that things could be different from how we had imagined them, understanding that a project, a set or an installation are not created to live on Autocad, but can be revised, readjusted or even, in the best case scenario, set up from the beginning starting from existing materials and resources without necessarily needing to produce or purchase new ones.It is clear that all this requires an effort and also a certain vision, but we are convinced that, even in this case as well as for many other lies that we often tell ourselves, in the end it is simply a matter of habit.

 

Have you noticed a difference in approach between when you started and today?
Absolutely yes.When we started the business, some of our interlocutors, especially those less close to the world of events, could hardly imagine such a rapid recirculation of materials.Luckily for us, however, those working in the sector immediately became curious.At the same time, some brands were initially worried about the possibility of finding their elements in the hands of competitors.Even in this case, many of these fears were quickly dispelled by the effective and widespread redistribution of the pieces among the local artistic/creative community.Little by little we begin to breathe an environmental awareness that goes beyond the different interpretations of ownership with respect to something that has been produced for or by one brand rather than another, and now common sense applies in relationships with suppliers, which aims to satisfy both parties and brings back the need to exploit existing resources more effectively.

How could we rethink the world of installations in a sustainable way?
First of all, starting from the early stages of research and concept design:designing and building already keeping in mind a possible new life for the individual elements;assembling the different materials with alternative methods to the use of glues or solvents, which often lead to the necessary destruction of some structures at the end of use because it is no longer possible to dismantle them;rethinking the production of basic elements, such as seats for fashion shows, reproduced in series every time
when the most logical solution would be to modify existing ones, saving on manpower and storage space as well as on the use of new virgin resources.

What is the added value of using setups designed for something perhaps even very different originally?
We believe that the use of new resources must be approached in a responsible and thoughtful manner.Reasoning starting from what already exists is a very useful creative exercise as well as a virtuous practice.We are the effect of a way of acting that is no longer sustainable, and Spazio Meta is our way of elevating some of these practices to a more balanced system.