An extraordinary project in the way it brings to life Friedrich Schiller’s concept of play, transforming clothing into a practical expression of freedom.

The design makes play a living experience, turning garments into a movable, free boundary between us and the world.

Can we play, almost therapeutically, with the boundaries of clothing, constantly redesigning them according to mood? The answer is yes, according to the Japanese finalists of ITS Contest 2022, Yudai and Anna Tanaka, who created a collection of toy garments by combining outdoor clothing and imaginary characters. A design project devised to soothe the souls of people of all ages. Entirely made from recycled down, all the pieces have been developed in primary colours and feature snap buttons that allow the wearer to play with different combinations, attaching them freely wherever they like. The therapeutic aspect of these garments is equally important: Yudai and Anna aimed to transform the experience of dressing into a playful, childlike one, offering comfort to those suffering from depression or stress and giving fashion a healing side.

Yudai and Anna continue to expand this universe combining fashion and play through their eponymous brand.

Our journey through Fashionlands – Clothes Beyond Borders comes to an end, revealing that both the ordinary and the extraordinary are parts of a supercontinent in perpetual motion—fragmenting and reuniting, yet always returning to Pangaea.

Creativity lies beneath it all, the deus ex machina of plate tectonics. It is the underground magma, carving out new directions and, as it solidifies, forming ordinary archetypes—starting points on the path to the extraordinary.

The ordinary, too, was once extraordinary before becoming the norm. Think of the T-shirt and its bold transformation from an undergarment, worn unseen, to a statement piece worn on display. Or the down jacket, which we haven’t explored in depth today, but which emerged between the two world wars from an intuition of mountaineers who saw, in the humble sleeping bag, the seed of a new kind of insulated outerwear.

In the extraordinary, we constantly seek the ordinary to make sense of it. We trace the origins of trousers, shirts, jackets… using the familiar to recognise the exceptional—just as, when recalling our dreams upon waking, we search for connections to the reality of the waking world.

Yet waking and dreaming are part of a single organism, just as magma and continents feed off one another, bound to the same borderless surface. This is the landscape of fashion—one that constantly allows us to take flight and see it from above. And the higher we soar, the more we grasp its unity, the absence of borders.

Now we can leave the gallery and head to the Wunderkammer, where we will find the second exhibition currently on display, "Borderless", entirely dedicated to the winners of ITS Contest 2025. But we invite you to return here to the gallery after our guided tour to spend as much time as you wish exploring the rest of the extraordinary and ordinary garments and objects. Remember, each work on display is equipped with a QR code to access numerous insights, including the concept behind the project, photographs of other pieces from the designer's collection, and video content.