Profile: Davide Mongiello – Real Leather Design Competitions

Davide Mongiello

Accademia Costume & Moda

Born in Potenza, Basilicata, Italy, I spent my first eighteen years approaching life experientially: I had the chance to move through the unspoilt landscapes of my homeland, letting myself be shaped by music, art, people, emotions, sensations. All of this became joyful memories and sincere melancholies, which I later worked through during my academic and creative path in Rome. To Virgil Abloh I owe my passion for fashion. Creatively, I come from his world — a world that speaks to young dreamers, to kids who love art, music and a culture rooted in hip-hop, but that over time expands and layers, just as the tastes of those who belong to it do. He was the one who showed me that fashion can be an accessible and ambitious language at once, capable of holding cultured references without losing lightness. My approach to design starts from the experiences I have had and continue to have in my everyday life. I draw mostly from the strong sensations triggered by simple gestures and ordinary moments: experiences so commonplace they can seem, at times, almost trivial. It is precisely in that triviality that I find the most interesting material: familiarity as a starting point for something unexpected. Music has always run parallel to my work, not as background noise, but as a current underneath it. When I create, I listen. The groove of a bassline, the tension in a chord, the sharpness of a rimshot: all of it seeps into what I make, guiding my hand toward forms and colours and details I might not have found in any other way. There is something in sound that bypasses the rational and speaks directly to a more interior place — a place where different sensibilities coexist, where a melody can carry the same emotional weight as a material or a gesture. I choose what I listen to the way I choose a reference: deliberately, because the atmosphere it creates becomes part of the work itself. More than any other art form, music has taught me to inhabit a feeling long enough to turn it into something you can touch. I tend to transform even the most nostalgic situations into concepts that feel cheerful and slightly ironic. In my work on menswear — and on accessories in particular — this tension between melancholy and lightness becomes a way of reading things: contemporary, young, never too serious. Designing men's accessories is, for me, a precise challenge: understanding how far I can push an idea or a form, while still staying within the limits of the product. Those limits are not an obstacle, they are the structure within which creativity finds its most honest shape.

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Vanilla Butter Pecan

Category: Accessories

Competitions: International

Rooted in pastry as a system of rigor and precision, Vanilla Butter Pecan explores how something fleeting can become intensely pleasurable through control, timing, and balance. The moment of dessert becomes a ritual: brief, collective, and charged with anticipation. A familiar scene where desire, memory, and playful tension converge, turning a simple gesture into a shared experience. Behind this moment lies a structured process. The tools and techniques of pastry- making, such as molding, layering and glazing, become a generative framework for the collection. This narrative translates into design through a tension between heritage and innovation, a dialogue between what feels familiar and what pushes forward. Rather than opposing each other, these dimensions coexist in a controlled equilibrium. Materials translate this logic into tactile experience: rubberized surfaces recall the softness and resistance of silicone moulds, while smooth finishes suggest processes of coating and setting. Like in pastry, the objects are built through proportions, timing, and sensory balance. Color and form do not describe, but evoke. What emerges is not a direct representation, but a distilled experience: something recognizable, yet slightly out of reach, suspended between what has been and what could become.