The Academy was born in the 1960s from an idea of maestro Domenico Lettieri.
The story begins in the 1950s in Vico Equense. Domenico Lettieri, a young boy, looked up to the elegant foreign tourists visiting the town, wished he could be like them, imitate them, and get noticed.
He began his quest for well-dressed and tailored clothes, so he started working in a small workshop. But, at that time, tailoring was an almost secret art that was guarded by the old tailors, who did not like to pass on the craft to the store boys.
Domenico realizes that the only way to learn is to observe the tailor from whom he works, trying to steal as many secrets as possible. He begins to specialize starting with the Neapolitan-style jacket.
Each student expresses his or her creativity and knows how to govern and channel it through technique.
In the 1960s he had the opportunity to join Marzotto, where he discovered that tailoring could also be industry. In fact, in those years, the tailor’s store began to fit the needs of people, who wanted comfort and choice. Domenico Lettieri feels that mass production is an opportunity to breathe new life into tailoring, because industry needs specialized figures.
He approached a geometric method for making models that were always proportionate to size and figure, and decided to import it to Naples, but making the method more streamlined and less mathematical, until it created an evolution that became a patented modeling method.
The key to the Academy’s modeling method, still used today, is simplification. It starts with a simplified geometric method, to make it more understandable and faster, suitable for production needs. Pattern design is reduced to the indispensable rules, those necessary to have freedom of movement in the transition between paper and fabric.
From this time on, he will open several schools in many regions of Italy, forging relationships with local companies. Soon, moreover, teaching was extended to women’s fashion, because women also began to have different needs, related to changes in society and culture.
Today, IUAD – Academy of Fashion is the institution of higher education in southern Italy recognized and accredited by the MUR among the AFAM Institutions for three-year Level I, Level II and Master’s courses in as many as four Departments: Fashion Design, Interior Design, Communication Design and Cinema & ADV.
Even today, we still preserve the tradition of people doing, preparing students to enter the world of work as professionals, thanks to curricula created with companies and from the needs of the market, and through participation in workshops, meetings with companies, and hands-on workshops.
A few years ago we opened our headquarters in Milan, in a historic building on Via Copernico, near the Central Station.
This is a very important step for our Academy, given the presence of so many fashion and design schools rooted in the Milanese territory. For us it is a challenge that stems from the desire to bring our point of view, without adapting to other methods, but exporting Neapolitan tradition and inspiration.
