Casual Crossing.

The sweatshirt: it’s both everyday and high fashion, and can be worn by anybody and everybody, regardless of gender, size or shape. That’s exactly why MINI FASHION has taken an interest in this modern wardrobe staple. Today, we’re all looking for clothes beyond categories, styles and ideas that come from shifts in perspective and new encounters, and the humble sweatshirt has seen them all. Because it’s so ubiquitous, it can cross borders, slipping over lines of class, race, ethnicity and gender with casual ease—from east to west, rich to poor, there’s no neighbourhood in the world where you won’t find one. This quiet achiever is the very epitome of what we like to call FLUID FASHION.

On the occasion of Pitti Uomo 90, MINI FASHION collaborated with five up-and-coming designers from around the world, and invited them to create a limited-edition sweatshirt, presented as the MINI FLUID FASHION Capsule Collection. Exploring the theme BOLD MEETS GENDERLESS, the designers found in the sweatshirt an ideal canvas for expressing their own interpretation of MINI’s audacious, open-minded character. The limited-edition sweatshirts project an optimistic feeling for fashion’s future, the result of MINI’s design expertise merging with the unique sensibility of creatives, who’ve spent their lives crossing borders both literally and metaphorically.

Italy’s Sunnei hails the sweatshirt’s everyday revolution by adorning theirs with the slogan ‘EVERYDAY I WEAR SUNNEI’, picked out in fresh optimistic colours. French duo Études Studio celebrate the joy of surprise and contradiction in their iconic blue and modernist typography. Agi and Sam from the UK reach back into history, drawing inspiration from the first female Bauhaus master Gunta Stölzl, while HIEN LE sticks with the contemporary, playfully deconstructing the ubiquitous ‘like’ heart of Instagram, exploring the borderlands between its positive and negative forms. China’s SANKUANZ is crossing boundaries between decades with references drawn from the sixties and the eighties. Their contemporary design shows a classic MINI car inserted into the world of a retro Chinese comic book.

SANKUANZ’s cheeky intervention connects MINI’s history to its future. Today, the original MINI seems like an iconic symbol of its age, its unpretentious style and clever design speaking for the aspirations of a whole generation. Might the sweatshirts on display at Pitti Uomo 2016 do the same for the historians of the future, offering a clue to the coming of a more fluid approach to gender and fashion, a world less hung up on borders and barriers? We like to hope so.