Twenty-four-year-old Gloria Cerrito from the Koefia Academy in Rome merges the world of haute couture with the fleeting, enigmatic aesthetics of dreaming in her graduation project REM. Her design emerges from the space between reality and dream, inspired by the mysterious figures that appear in our nightmares — familiar yet unsettlingly strange.
“I wanted to portray the beings that appear in our dreams, those that seem human but reveal their true, monstrous nature through a small, uncanny detail,” says Gloria Cerrito.
The dress is an homage to the REM sleep phase, when the brain dreams actively and the boundary between reality and illusion begins to blur. Gloria Cerrito translates this psychological phenomenon into fashion, creating a silhouette full of tension in which elegance and unease intertwine.
The physical dress is made of fine couture fabrics overlaid with 3D-printed scales. These elements, first digitally designed in CLO3D and then precisely crafted, give the look an organic yet surreal structure. The scales climb over the sleeves like growing fragments of a dream, while luxurious wool shimmers beneath the surface.
The digitally created details enable precise staging of contrasts, while the hand-executed couture techniques add sensual depth to the design. In REM, simulation and reality, dream and fabric merge. The result is a symbiosis of traditional tailoring and digital design that transforms the intangible realm of dreams into a tangible garment.
