Tobias Kaspar
September Issue

On the occasion of Milan Fashion Week 2025, Spazio Lima presents September Issue, a new project by artist Tobias Kaspar that questions fashion’s conventions in order to redefine its value.
Far from the catwalks’ clamor, the artist weaves a narrative that explores the role of clothing as a vehicle for identity, stories, and collective ties.

At the heart of the exhibition is the fourteenth chapter of his Biography Collection, a traveling project started in 2014. Like a sartorial atlas, Kaspar draws a portrait of the places that host the project using garments donated by their inhabitants.

If the previous chapter—at the MadeIn Art Museum in Shanghai—turned the collection into a kind of living archive of the local community surrounding the museum, in Milan the project becomes even more intimate. Through this collection, a portrait of the architecture studio pconp and its collaborators takes shape—those who, for nearly two decades, have hosted Spazio Lima within their working environment.

The project then extends to the wider local community through a collaboration with a group of young students from a Milanese fashion academy. These exceptional models wear the kindly donated garments, becoming protagonists of a public runway show. For the first time, Spazio Lima opens its doors and moves outdoors, temporarily occupying a portion of the Benedetto Marcello urban garden.

Guided by Kaspar in their choice of outfits, the students stage a collective and dynamic portrait, offering those who contributed clothing the opportunity to see their identities on the runway—cast in a new light. The act of gifting and exchange, which strips garments of their original labels to assign them new meaning, transforms each item into a symbol of belonging.

Alongside this gesture of sharing, the exhibition presents a photographic series in which Kaspar scans Off-White garments from 2021, the year of Virgil Abloh’s passing. This is not mere documentation: the artist shifts the focus from surface to detail, concentrating on prints, folds, and labels that seem to come alive. The garments cease to be mere fashion objects and become relics of their time, infused with a “second-hand” iconography that intertwines the glamour of the brand with Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting traditions.

Kaspar thus interrogates contemporary dynamics of appropriation, desire, and image circulation, generating a tension between high fashion and art, market value and history.
September Issue engages with the feverish pace of Milan Fashion Week, but does so with a counter-movement. At the height of fashion’s exposure, Kaspar shifts the focus from individuality to community, from exclusivity to sharing. The exhibition is an invitation to reflect on a kind of sustainability that goes beyond materials and touches on ways of living, creating, and connecting. It is an artistic operation that doesn’t merely critique, but proposes an alternative: a return to clothing as an expression of belonging—not just consumption.