Giulia M Now

The fashion world anointed her. Vogue called her "the poet of decay." Offers arrived daily: a perfume bottle shaped like a fossil, a jewelry line made of melted circuit boards.

Her materials read like a crime scene inventory: melted vinyl records from a flooded Naples archive, glass shards from a 1980s nightclub mirror, rainwater collected from the rooftops of five different psychiatric hospitals. Nothing is arbitrary. Every inclusion is a citation. In 2022, Gucci came calling. Alessandro Michele, then creative director, asked her to design the sound environment for a runway show in a deconsecrated church. She agreed—but only if she could also build the floor. The result was a catwalk of compressed ash from a burned forest in Calabria, embedded with contact microphones. As models walked, the floor emitted a dry, granular crackle.

She returned to the Lambrate warehouse and began her most ambitious work yet: The Unfinished City . The Unfinished City is not a single artwork. It is a series of twelve installations, each housed in a different abandoned building across Milan. Each installation corresponds to one of the city's neglected senses: the sound of a tram line that no longer exists, the smell of the Navigli canals before they were covered, the texture of a cinema carpet from 1974. giulia m

"It's about the collective unconscious of a place," she explains. "A city is not its landmarks. A city is its abandoned conversations."

But ask her what she does, and she smiles. "I listen," she says. "Then I build a place for what I heard." The fashion world anointed her

Giulia M.'s "The Unfinished City" runs through November. By appointment only. No photography. Bring nothing. Leave changed.

"Fashion wants the aesthetic of depth without the weight," she says now, not bitterly but factually. "I don't make decoration. I make rituals." Nothing is arbitrary

"I'm not nostalgic," she insists. "Nostalgia is lazy. I'm interested in grief for futures that never arrived . That's different."

When pressed for details, she smiles again. That same quiet, knowing smile. "You'll hear it when it's ready." Standing in her warehouse at dusk, as the light slants through grime-streaked windows and Zero the cat naps on a pile of deconstructed radios, Giulia M. looks less like an artist and more like a watchmaker. She is hunched over a circuit board, attaching a wire no thicker than a hair. The room hums—not loudly, but present. A low G.

She is also rumored to be writing a book. Not an artist's monograph, but a novel—one she says is "about a woman who builds a house out of other people's alarm clocks."