In the panorama of contemporary fashion and design, where innovation is increasingly intertwined with artistic experimentation, Taroni marks an absolute record with Silk in Space: the first launch into the stratosphere of a silk fabric. A visionary project that, in October 2025, brought the excellence of Como’s silk industry beyond the boundaries of the earth’s atmosphere, transforming an iconic material into the protagonist of an experience never achieved before.
Founded in Como in 1880, Taroni has been synonymous with the highest quality silk for haute couture and high-end ready-to-wear for over a century. With Silk in Space, the company takes a further step: not only excellent textile production, but cultural and artistic storytelling of the material. The idea was born from an intuition of Maximilian Canepa, CEO and Creative Director of the brand, during a solar eclipse: observing the launch of an atmospheric balloon, he imagined entrusting Taroni silk with the same journey, transforming it into a visual witness of an experience at the limits of the possible.
The project takes shape in the isolated regions of Quebec, Canada. A stratospheric balloon transports a life-size mannequin to an altitude of about 40,000 meters , made of ultra-light material and draped with an ultra-light double satin developed internally by Taroni. Equipped with video cameras, GPS and parachutes for controlled reentry, the structure allows you to document unpublished images: silk floating in space with the Earth in the background. In the absence of air pollution, sunlight hits the fabric revealing its chromatic shades in their purest form, offering an absolute vision of color.
Created in collaboration with The Dorothy Project, a Canadian collective specializing in stratospheric launches, the mission celebrates silk as a cultural, historical and deeply human fiber. In a global context in which silk today represents only 0.2% of textile consumption, Silk in Space restores centrality to a material that has built centuries of savoir-faire, while demonstrating how tradition and technology can dialogue in unexpected ways.
The stratospheric flight is also part of the artistic research of Canepa and the artist Lillian Grant, who have been photographing Taroni fabrics in symbolic places around the world for years. This experience becomes the natural evolution of that path: a project destined to be transformed into a video installation and a visual narrative dedicated to the beauty of silk outside its usual context.
With Silk in Space, Taroni goes beyond the boundaries of fashion and textile manufacturing to explore new relationships between material, art, technology and memory. Silk is no longer just a surface, but a message: a medium capable of generating emotional and cultural connections, telling the value of Made in Italy in a dimension literally without gravity. A symbolic and powerful gesture that redefines the way of communicating a luxury product, projecting it into the future without losing the link with its history.
INFO/PHOTO COURTESY: taroni@camronglobal.com
