ROT introduce the latest collection for Italian Label Fashion entitled L’Île du Diable, its first exploration of evening-wear Collection.

ROT is a fashion label founded in Reggio Emilia in 2024 by Emanuele Bonavolta, who came to fashion from literature. It was born as a knitwear house, and its knitwear is still made in Reggio Emilia by exceptional artisans. FW26 came out in two drops, Ouverture and PartenoROT, photographed in the fog of the Po Valley and in the mystery of Naples, where Bonavolta’s parents come from. L’Île du Diable is the new chapter of ROT and the brand’s first work in wovens, all in silk satin and silk organza, produced in Brescia.

With L’Île du Diable, ROT introduces silk satin and silk organza, produced in Brescia. Inspired by the Dreyfus affair and Émile Zola’s J’accuse…!, the collection examines how social narratives shape identity and how individuals are judged against expectations of desirability and conformity. Taking a stance alongside Zola, Bonavolta explores exile as a form of resistance and a refusal of imposed narratives.

On 13 January 1898 L’Aurore publishes J’accuse…!, in which Émile Zola takes up the defence of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army convicted of treason and shipped to Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. Dreyfus was innocent. His guilt had been written before it was proven, and once written, it held up on its own, as long as every detail was read in the right direction. Zola does the simplest and most dangerous thing one can do with a story of that kind. He takes it apart in public. It costs him a conviction for libel and exile in England.

What interests Bonavolta most in the Dreyfus affair is the mechanism, the way a story arrives before the person and ends up taking their place. No tribunal is needed for it to work; a ready-made image is enough to turn every gesture, every word, into a confirmation.

Today the mechanism operates in emotional and social life, even in the circles that describe themselves as the freest. Immediate availability, performance, desirability as capital: whoever does not conform experiences it as a personal flaw, rarely as a choice. For a gay man it can mean being left out of the hierarchies of erotic prestige. For a woman it means being subjected to constant evaluation, which asks her to be free but not too free, desirable but without the guilt of being so. There is no judge and no sentence, and the verdict arrives anyway.

L’Île du Diable stands with Zola. To escape this invisible tribunal we choose exile, and stay proudly on Devil’s Island, glittering in our guilt.

All images by the brand. PR Agency Autrement PR Paris.