Time, art and surfaces also characterized the presentation of Stone Island, dedicated to the sixth episode of the Prototype Series project, a path that envisages the creation of limited editions of non industrializable garments.

Here too a collaboration, but this time with Kevlar , which has made available a special Nm200/l yarn covered with double Nm170/2 cotton yarn. The result is a cotton fabric with a Kevlar core which is then printed with a dévoré technique: the outer yarn is consumed and the inner one is revealed.

The result is a sort of hi-tech lace that looks like an ancient material, the relic of a bygone era. This is the starting point for the artist Etienne Russo, who in the installation of the FuoriSalone used a succession of large lenses to highlight details and distort the context.

What if the rethinking of the surface led to a radical change in the object itself?

Vibram has been doing this for twenty years, or since it launched the FiveFingers, shoes that are difficult to define precisely because of their revolutionary nature. This important anniversary was celebrated with an anthological exhibition at the Vibram Connection Lab in via Voghera in Milan, where over one hundred prototypes selected by Robert Fliri (the inventor of this 'foot glove'), who drew from the company archive and his personal archive.

Displayed without display cases, labeled as evidence of a crime scene, illuminated by the poetic light installations of Mandalaki Studio, all FiveFingers underlined a story in which fabrics and soles could change in an extreme way, creating surprising bridges between essentiality and luxury, between the usual and the unexpected, between artifice and nature.

Nike also works with constancy and consistency to rewrite the very meaning of footwear.

It did so with air in the soles, with adaptive collections, with sponsorships, with very limited editions, with on and off-line retail. It does so also with sustainability, not stopping at 'good' materials and responsible production cycles, but also thinking about the design itself.

Many will remember Zvezdochka by Marc Newson, modular and disassemblable, made up of four independent elements.

It was 2004 but the concept is still valid today and took shape with the ISPA series, in which the different parts of the sneaker can be easily joined and detached, separated at the end of life and thrown away as you do with the peel of a fruit.

ISPA is an acronym that encloses a design manifesto, a process that suggests 'Improvise, Scavenge, Protect, Adapt', or Improvise, Find, Protect, Adapt.

An excellent suggestion for rethinking not only the surface of things, but also everything beyond, to imagine a future in which matter and meaning can establish an ever more authentic relationship.