Photo Kaleigh Conners
Photo Kaleigh Conners
“Miriam” is my graduation project in Fashion Design at NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, which I completed in July 2025.
The film was selected and nominated at the Fashion Movie Festival in London, ASVOFF (A Shaded View on Fashion Film) in Paris and at the Berlin Fashion Film Festival.
I have never been someone you would call a ballet lover. I always admired it from a distance: the discipline, the movement, the music, the emotion. But I never felt it had anything to do with me personally.
That changed during the final months of my fashion design studies, which were probably one of the most intense and exhausting periods of my life. It was then that I found my way much deeper into the world of ballet, and unexpectedly, something of it stayed with me.
The idea for Saudade first came to me during a trip to New York in November 2023. As a fashion designer, my work is closely tied to my own experiences, so what I was going through at the time naturally began to shape my designs.
Back then, I was rewatching all the Batman films and discovering Gotham and its characters from a new perspective. Bruce Wayne, Catwoman and the Joker were no longer just fictional icons to me; they were becoming emotional symbols. They stood for identity, desire, chaos and transformation.