About
About Me | Mission | Vision | Foundation
Anchored in Love, Life, and Beauty
"Beauty is the Love for Life;
La Bellezza è L'Amore per la Vita."
This is my valued motto as an artist.
A specialized, matured, and ardent contributor to the art of fashion and design, graphics, storytelling, beauty-hunting, and essentially creating. An innate passion and urge for the crafting of beautiful, contemporary yet timeless ideas-made-real! Vigorously preoccupied in stimulating each of the senses with those creations. Eager to animate through mood boards, imagery, draping, specially designed prints, textiles, embellishments, branded graphics, story-telling folios, and, most essentially, bellezza. This is my lifetime dream-in-the-making!
#comedreamwithme
Marianna Valente
Born in the northern Chicago suburbs of Italian parents. I grew up between the USA and southern Italy in my family hometown and later moved to Milan at the age of 18 to attend the prominent Fashion School Istituto Marangoni. I matured my fashion career with Piazza Sempione under LVMH and proceeded with multiple other design collaborations in NYC and Miami. Dreams in an Armoire was founded in 2019. Currently based in Miami but frequent between southern Italy and Milan for resources, scouting, development, and production.
A Contemporary Atelier Made to Inspire
All pieces are exclusively made in Italy of specially selected Italian textiles and showcased via thematic capsules. #Designedwhereverimaybe.
I dedicate each stand-out collection to my dreams as much as to yours. My focus is on a collaborative partnership, a bond if you will, with each individual client or buyer, whether it be one appointment or a series of many. I seek to beautify through fashion luxury each Dreams client, indulging them with curated prints and bespoke fabric combinations, upon custom-made request even. As a result, in the wearing, each piece may bring life to its own ever personal source of inspiration and emotion or to an extraordinary fusion thereof. Inspiration, in my thoughts, can be a masterful chain reaction of each others' and in this way, the Beauty of and for Life, Love, and Creation is served!
Meet Me Behind the Armoire
Nonna’s Armoire: My treasure chest of fluttering dreams and inspiration. Nestled among the preciously stored remnants and garments, the interior reveals tales, joys, heartaches, fragrances, musical notes, and life lessons. In short, the well-kept secrets of my soul, my vigor, and my drive. Peering ever so carefully into this sublime treasure trove, I am carried off into an extraordinary daydream. With eyes glistening, meditative, my hands delicately caress each treasure. I re-awaken with a blink from this enchantment, now bearing fruit for craft and creation.
The Dreams in an Armoire collection is a curated dedication to my maternal and paternal grandmother’s armoires where vibrant stories are juxtaposed through two fascinating eras and two incredibly diverse women. Their contrasting personas, style, and poise have unveiled in me a genuine sensitivity to an innovative yet effortless approach to the alliance of fashion and elegance. I have crafted, from the memoirs of each, a volatile personal style that I could never put my finger on throughout my youth and which has now prompted me to devise a special collection by way of honor, intrigue, and dream-seeking.
Timeless and powerful femininity is key to this armoire, as well as tradition, refinement, impeccable tailoring, and innovative details, encompassed with a graceful conceptual vision. The endearment and nurturing of each Nonna are technically recreated with the same love they mended their own garments, their families, and their daily lives even during the harshest of times. This is conveyed by the unique and thoughtful combination of elaborate and classic fabrics, trimmings, subtle detailing, and carefully researched finishing for each piece, studied according to small batches of high-quality textiles, as well as by our manufacturer’s finesse and masterful craft. Additionally, that same love is expressed by the dedication given to each timeless style (and each of its possible textile variations), named singularly and in the representation of memorable women in my life or pertinent to the Dreams vision. The names enforce the emotive memory linked to each silhouette and allow for the rebirth of one idea into a multitude of variable options and visions.
Complementing the dreamy mix is the uniquely blended color palette, often playing between reminiscent, neutral, and pop tones, paired with eclectic and exclusively designed prints. The selected prints further narrate the concepts proposed in each capsule.
Underlying each micro-theme, Dreams also seeks to relay in fine hints an overlap between the post-war rigor of the 1940s and the Italian Dolce Vita of the 1950s; in this way unifying time of supreme discipline to one of liberation and newly exposed femininity. I dare to experiment at the point of transition of these eras by fusing their opposing rigor and liberty, their severity and daintiness, meanwhile fine-tuning according to pure whimsical expression.
Returning down memory lane: a young and innocent fashionista, of her own kind, eagerly chooses a micro-printed vestaglietta (house dress) each day from Nonna’s armoire. She plays dress up in the kitchen by morning and attempts stitching together snippets of market fabric during the sunny afternoon. Legs crossed next to Nonna, a particularly incandescent light peeking through the half-open curtains, the girl smiles at Nonna’s change of musical pitches. She eagerly awaits the next precious piece of cut-off fabric Nonna will slip into her trembling hands, as she continues with her own magical mending. Mini-me a la mode is enkindled by each offering, captivated by this quaint moment, redefining her own ethereal paradise. She tucks away those micro-floral bits and pieces for safekeeping, as gold for pirates, while the whole world outside chatters on across balconies and plazas.
Today, I hold those pieces dearly and wholeheartedly, breathing in, inspired. I raise my eyes to the sky and I seem to perceive quite distinctly those bittersweet notes, those deeply familiar hymns, as I step into my armoire of dreams.
A Constant Family Affair
Thanks to those that sow the seeds, those that give one the strength and courage to reap, #dreamsdocometrue.
Aside from the deep family roots nestled in the general inspiration, it is always a family affair here: my brother's bravura steers the imagery and the digital vision for Dreams as Executive Producer and Director of photography, videography, and branded events. He is my best backup on everything and anything logistic or strategic and my saving grace for confidence, calm, and patience when my creative drive is running wild. Our parents, besides having invested throughout our childhood in our influential estati italiane as well as in my fashion school formation away from home, are the heartbeat of everything I have been able to put into motion by way of their instruction, discipline, love, persistence, and pride. They have enabled and guided me to where I stand today.
Their backgrounds may not be evidently fashion-based, but each has their own tricks up their sleeves. For example, there may not be an art in numbers, but there certainly is one in organizing those numbers (father); there is an intriguing similarity in combining traditional southern Italian cooking, generational recipes, and baking with modern global ingredients and tweaks (mom). Then again it was also mom that paired my socks to my every outfit in elementary school and made me dress nicely on Sundays; my father that measured my skirt hem (or missing thereof) with the palm of his hand and allowed me to spend on shoes made in Italy because he was terrified by standard American sneakers and such. This is all part of the groundwork!
Grateful and dutiful are merely words to express the feelings bubbling within me on the daily; my own collection is now the tangible revelation. Well said it was, "Love is all you need."
