Simon Cracker SS25 at Milan Fashion Week

Simon Cracker SS25 / Spring Summer 2025 at Milan Fashion Week entitled “A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE”

When we play the card of ‘the matter of principle’, we create a short circuit in communication and interpersonal relations. This card overrides even common sense and presents our interlocutor with an empty vessel, creating a communicative ‘knot’ that is difficult to untangle. We don’t want to be overtly political in our narrative, however, we felt the need to metaphorically recount a state of affairs: today, not using any medium (including fashion) to ignite critical thinking would be a criminal act.

We used knots as a sartorial technique to give our thought concrete form, inspired by the book ‘Knots’ by psychologist Ronald D. Laing, published in 1970. Our clothes have been created almost exclusively by knotting: flaps of fabric, drawstrings, strings and laces that simultaneously give a sense of union and ornamentation but also of constriction.

Simon Cracker SS25 / Spring Summer 2025 collection is structured in four ‘nervous’ colours: in addition to absolute black, shades of artificial blue, acid green and violet develop the ‘wrong’ dyeing effect started with last season.

AUSTRALIAN, a historic Italian brand of tennis apparel first and now sportswear in the broadest sense (and with a foot in club-culture as well), gave us access to an incredible deadstock of semi-assembled garments for our upcycled pieces. Furthermore, in collaboration with the brand’s creative team, we developed a capsule of black/neon technical garments, which will be part of the main collection for Australian SS25.

We have also collaborated with DR. MARTENS, the shoes that have always and forever been iconic ‘on principle’. Here too, the brand’s deadstock has been ‘crackerized’ by dyeing, disassembling and customising by hand with pins, badges and pieces of old costume jewellery. Each pair of shoes is unique, just like our clothes.

Simon Cracker SS25 / Spring Summer 2025 collection is dedicated to the children victims of matters of principle.

Simone and Filippo

The brand SIMON CRACKER is a project by Filippo L.M. Biraghi and Simone Botte, where “Crack” is the sound of something that gets broken and it’s the starting point of it all: breaking something that already exists in order to give it a new life.

The brand was born in 2010 from an idea of Simone Botte, art director, stylist and fabrics and printings researcher, as an upcycling clothing line, giving a second chance to ‘forgotten’ garments, deadstock fabrics and everything discarded by other people.

In 2020 Filippo L.M. Biraghi, editor, buyer and fashion culture lecturer joins in and the brand goes mainstream, entering the competition Who is On Next?, joining Altaroma and being in the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana official calendar since 2021.

We approach fashion from a divergent point of view, we like individualizes and not sterotypes, our values are linked to the lack of tools that stimulates creativity, we want to give back to clothes a value that is not just related to their price but more to the stories they tell. Choosing upcycling is not an aesthetic or trendy choice, but an ethical one. Through this technique our narration changes season by season. Our garments have on season or gender.

A very special thanks to Arca Milano, Australian, Dr, Martens, Hub Communication, Michelangelo Vood, Luciano Parisi, Giulia Solari, Andrea Boschetti, Jacopo Mezzadri, Melanie Meris, Susi Foschi, Marina Guidi, Christina Holm, Maximilian Linz, Marcello Pilade, Maria Aminta, Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana per l’inserimento nel calendario ufficiale, and most of all the Cracker Crew that supports us with un conditional love and trust.