MILO’ TRICOT SPRING/SUMMER 2015 TRANOI NEW YORK
Founded in New York in 2009, Milo’ was introduced as a collection of modern knitwear for girls. Following immediate success, its founder and creative director Mireia Lopez, a Barcelona native and proud New Yorker, decided to re-launch the brand, this time focusing on women and continuing the same principles of beautifully crafted knitwear.
The inaugural collection for Fall Winter 2013, and every collection since, reflects Mireia’s aesthetic preferences and signature deconstructed silhouettes, combined with clean architectural lines. She draws inspiration from modern dance, mastered by her long time muse Pina Bausch, who deconstructed even intense and painful feelings into movement, expressions, sound and light. Some of Mireia’s most powerful visual influences have come from the mood and intensity of the early films from German Expressionism, especially the work of Fritz Lang, Film Noir, Surrealist Cinema, Luis Buñuel and Ingmar Bergman.
Notwithstanding the city of Barcelona’s undeniable cultural impact, Mireia also comes from a rich heritage of design. Being a designer was an organic process, having grown up in her family’s manufacturing business. She was born into a family who believed that the best way to learn the business was by working in it. Wanting to be independent and to buy her own clothes, her mother put her to work right way, teaching her how to cut fabric and operate overlock machines at an early age. At age 15, Mireia decided that she wanted to become a fashion designer and to work on the creative side.
After graduating from F.E.L.I in Barcelona with a degree in Arts and Techniques of Fashion, she started working for Mango at a very exciting time in fashion, with the emergence and impact of the ‘Antwerp Six’ in the early ‘90’s. Mango was a growing company then and Mireia had the opportunity to work with her favorite photographers like Corinne Day, and models like Christy Turlington and Emma Balfour. This was a lesson on the importance of visual expression.
Mireia spent the next twenty years working for some of the fashion industry’s leading brands in Europe and in the United States and has also designed knitwear for designers including Miguel Adrover, Zac Posen and Cushnie et Ochs. She still maintains her knitwear design consultancy – Tricot – Lab – while designing the Milo’ collection.