Laud and praud
2025 edition
Backstage photo of the Laud and Praud fashion show in Milan. Credit: Margareta Moen.
LAUD END PRAUD returned to Milan with a renewed, intense, and deeply necessary edition. Once again, the event brought fashion, activism, and culture together in a collective gesture of affirmation and resistance in concrete support of the LGBTQIA+ community. Conceived by Andrea Semeghini, creative director of VANADIO23, the 2025 edition offered an even more multifaceted program, where activism and creativity met to shape a welcoming, fluid, and inclusive space.
Taking place a week before Milan Pride and at the opening of Fashion Week, LAUD END PRAUD positioned itself as a place of encounter, dialogue, and celebration, where everyone could feel free to express themselves without fear or judgment.
“We envision a world where everyone can live their identity and sexual orientation with freedom, safety, and joy. With lightness, irony, and playfulness, we want to help dismantle the cultural norms tied to gender.”
This mission had become increasingly urgent, as data on homo-transphobic violence continued to rise. LAUD END PRAUD responded with a collective call for change, building a transversal and inclusive format made of talks, podcasts, DJ sets, and shared moments of expression.
The fashion show Queer Nature
These capsules, inspired by queer love and queer nature, expressed a fluid, rich, and complex vision of identity, relationships, and reproductive strategies in the natural world. The show reaffirmed fashion’s ability to act as a tool for awareness and transformation.
As in 2024, the casting was curated by Maria Aminta Daniele, with styling by Simone Furlan. All proceeds from the sale of the looks were donated to Lo Sportello Trans ALA Milano Onlus, led by Antonia Monopoli, supporting the social inclusion of transgender people.
The central theme of the 2025 edition was “Queer Nature,” a fashion show exploring queer affectivity in the animal and plant worlds, dismantling the notion that homosexuality is a uniquely human “deviation.” Nature, on the contrary, is full of examples of fluidity, transformation, and adaptation, acting as a living archive of diversity. From bonobos and giraffes to dolphins and albatrosses, to insects, fish, and plants capable of changing sex or combining multiple sexual identities within a single organism, nature demonstrated just how limiting a binary vision of sexuality and gender truly is.
As in previous editions, each designer was invited to interpret a specific theme inspired by the natural world. The 2025 lineup featured: BE NINA with Cactus and Homosexuality, Lorenzo Seghezzi with Orchid and Transsexuality, Florania with Butterfly and Hermaphroditism, Andreazza with Beetle and Bisexuality, Simon Cracker with Penguin and Homosexuality, Domenico Orefice with Clownfish and Transsexuality, and the IED students (Lorenzo Caola, Letizia Lucchini, Francesco Gregorace) with Tomato and Hermaphroditism.
The Talks
The 2025 edition also hosted a series of discussion panels that deepened the relationship between language, identity, and the natural world.
The first talk, dedicated to etymology and linguistic violence, examined the origins and evolution of offensive language directed at the LGBTQIA+ community. It offered a moment of collective reflection on how stereotypes are constructed and how words actively shape our reality. Contributions came from Giorgio Bozzo for “Le radici dell’orgoglio” and from Stefano Rossini and Elianna Gatti for “La vita segreta delle parole.”
A second panel explored ethology and queer nature, challenging the idea of what is considered “natural.” Through a journey into the animal and plant kingdoms, speakers illustrated non-binary affective, sexual, and gender behaviors across species, presenting scientific narratives that debunk the myth of queer identities being “against nature.” The session reframed nature not as a rigid binary system, but as a vast continuum of possibilities in which queerness fully belongs.
Get in touch
Thinking about a collaboration or just want to connect with Andrea about Laud and Praud? Say hello!