Villa Medici’s Innovative Fashion Residency: A New Chapter for Ashpool and Delon

Villa Medici will host two designers a year. The French fashion academy in Rome has announced the creation of its fashion residency, in collaboration with the Institut Français de la Mode (Ifm) and the Défi network. The program has already selected the two designers of the first edition, the French Stéphane Ashpool and the Strasbourg-born Prune Delon, who will move to Rome and take up residence at the Villa Medici.

This fall, French designer Stéphane Ashpool will move to Villa Medici after winning the first edition. His project, entitled Ready to Dye, seeks to create an innovative approach to color applied to textiles and surfaces, exploring symbolic, technical and environmental dimensions. The results of his work will be presented next summer, after the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games.

Villa Medici hosts more than seventy artists, creators and researchers per year

The Strasbourg designer Prune Delon will move to Rome next spring. Her project explores the connection between nature, memory and the body, through animal figures and plant motifs full of symbolism. Delon graduated in 2023 with a degree in fashion design from the Institut Français de la Mode, and presented her graduation collection at Paris Fashion Week. She also worked for a few months in Schiaparelli’s embroidery department, before collaborating with designer Charles de Vilmorin on his handmade mohair furs.

Promoted by the French Academy in Rome, the new residency broadens the approach of openness and dialogue between the different disciplines of art and fashion, and features more than twelve residency programs in all fields of creation. About seventy artists, creators and researchers a year are welcomed at Villa Medici.