Andrea Adamo Is Scaling Up His Brand, One Capsule Collection at a Time
MILAN — Andrea Adamo’s holiday season is shaping up to be busier than usual.
The Italian designer, one of the new names on the country’s fashion landscape with his Andreādamo brand of sensual, body-hugging knitwear, has launched a series of capsule collections with international retailers for the resort 2022 season.
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Starting from this month, Selfridges, Net-a-porter and Antonia each added exclusive key items to their selection of the brand’s pieces to enrich their offer both in-store and online.
Selfridges has asked the designer to render three of the most distinctive items in the brand’s spring 2022 collection in a new color, which represented a novelty for a label that is known for its palette of skin tones.
As result, a ribbed cardigan with frontal pockets and graphic cutouts, flared pants with spiral-shaped intarsia embellishment on the sides and an asymmetric mini dress have been introduced in a new military green shade.
“It’s the first time we introduce a proper color. We gave them some guidelines in this sense, so that the brand’s identity could be always respected. Then based on the parameters we provided, the retailer opted for this shade,” said Adamo.
For Net-a-porter, Adamo tweaked silhouettes, designing two new styles for the e-tailer. These included a ribbed long black dress with revealing cutouts and a shorter option with frontal buttons in a nude tone.
Courtesy of Andreādamo
For Milan’s luxury shopping destination Antonia, Adamo combined the two elements, conceiving a new, sinuous knitted mini dress style in military green.
The average price for capsule collections is around 450 euros to 500 euros, in line with the positioning of the brand that Adamo billed as affordable luxury. In general the average retail price for the label — which includes jersey pieces and underwear, in addition to knitwear — is 350 euros.
The company first experimented with capsule collections in designing a special dress for LuisaViaRoma earlier this year and is now looking to bolster this strategy to raise its brand awareness both in Italy and in other markets.
“We covered the Italian market with LuisaViaRoma and Antonia, the U.K. with Selfridges and Net-a-porter, which also enabled us to reach customers in the rest of Europe and the U.S. Now we would like to approach Asia, specifically entering the Chinese market,” said Andreādamo’s brand manager Melania Ronchi, revealing that the company’s goal is to tie up with Lane Crawford.
“These kinds of projects require extra effort in terms of creativity and production, of course, but remain interesting for us for many reasons. They enable us to increase our sales, support our retail partners and enhance Andrea’s name,” continued Ronchi, underscoring the exponential progress the emerging brand has made since its launch last year.
Courtesy of Andreādamo
In just three seasons, Andreādamo attracted the interest of major international retailers, including Modes and Sugar in Italy, Tsum in Moscow and Harvey Nichols in London.
“At the moment, Italy, the U.S. and the U.K. are our main markets but we see a lot of potential for growth in Eastern Europe,” added Ronchi.
Overall, the executive underscored that the women’s wear brand is performing particularly well on e-commerce platforms, both due to customers’ new penchant for online shopping caused by the pandemic and for the significant engagement the label has with a young audience.
From a design perspective, Adamo said that he envisions his peers during the creative process, referencing a core target of clients aged 25 to 37, but also noted that in reality this demographic changes according to geographies and products.
In Italian luxury resort destinations, for one, sales are driven by more mature customers, who are keen on the brand’s knitted long dresses or second-skin, pencil skirts, whereas cropped mini tops resonate more with younger clients.
“That’s because sensuality has no age,” said Adamo, whose brand is also grounded in the message of body positivity it sends.
The label’s heterogeneous target matches the diversity of the muses inspiring Adamo, whose references range from American activist Angela Davis and Brazilian ballet dancer Ingrid Silva to Hailey Bieber and Zendaya. While the former two personalities were pivotal in inspiring the inclusive ideology behind the brand, the latter two celebrities epitomize the unapologetic attitude the label wants to telegraph.
Courtesy of Andreādamo
Born in 1984 in Crotone — in Italy’s Calabria region — Adamo cut his teeth at Elisabetta Franchi before working in the eveningwear division of Roberto Cavalli. Other roles were at Zuhair Murad in Paris, as head designer celebrities and special projects for Dolce & Gabbana, and, most recently, at Ingie Paris.
Under his namesake brand he celebrated being comfortable in one’s own skin through his seductive designs and employing knitwear and a seamless technology. Now he’s introducing new techniques as well as expanding product categories. As he is readying the fall 2022 collection to be unveiled next February during Milan Fashion Week, Adamo teased that he will be introducing new fabrics and further exploring outerwear.
Longer term, the designer’s destiny might not be linked only to Milan. Adamo revealed he has two personal dreams — one leading to Paris, where one day he would like to present a couture collection under his label, and one leading to his hometown.
“I come from a city where there are no dreams nor hopes. It’s known mostly for criminality but I would like to host a show in my hometown one day to prove that even from a place like that, you can still believe in dreams,” he concluded.
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