Haus Nuller is the burgeoning Bauhaus-inspired fashion label debuting at the Venice Biennale

Just a 14-minute water taxi from the chaos of Venice Biennale’s epicentre, 27-year-old designer Chiara Angelica Gandini is finalising the launch exhibition for her fashion-label-cum studio, Haus Nuller. Clad in a crimson Issey Miyake plissé dress and fishnet flats, the Central Saint Martins-educated textile designer is tall with slicked back hair and an Italian lilt that reveals her Brescian upbringing. We’re stood inside the shell of a classic Venetian building, her family’s home in the quieter locale of Dorsoduro, which has been repurposed for the occasion.

Spread across palazzo-style rooms, her signature textiles – woollens hand-woven with stainless steel chains – are displayed at various stages in the painstaking design process, spanning digital patterns (each pixel corresponds to one thread) through to double-loom swatches framed as singular artworks. Design duo Formafantasma have curated the layout as a pared-back series of plinths, LED lighting and partitions tiled with the studio’s inaugural campaign, art directed by Stefanie Barth.

‘Haus Nuller: Breaking the Chain’ at the Venice Biennale

Entitled ‘Breaking the Chain’, the collection in question is a tight capsule of long coats, dresses, separates and capes – distressed just so on the outside. Gandini pores over a clothes rail, gesturing as she weighs up why a satellite event during the most prestigious art expo of the year was the right place and the right time to share her work – and not, say, fashion week. ‘Venice, it’s very interesting,’ she says, smiling. ‘The engineering of the city is super complicated, but it's also very fragile, right? I saw a connection with my practice.’ An assistant models one of the made-to-order designs, deliberately revealing its underside where the sparkling threadwork appears like a lining.

A longstanding interior design buff and Anni Albers fanatic – Gandini also calls out Yohji Yamamoto and anyone ‘that creates their own system when there wasn’t one that fit’ – takes visible joy in demonstrating the technical process behind her work, prompting me with snapshots from her phone. She takes me to another room to watch a process video. The footage shows merino and alpaca wool threads spread on the loom while a weaver’s hand applies metal chains across the weft. ‘It takes a while,’ she laughs. The weavers (all women, Gandini notes) behind the handiwork are spread across Europe: Barcelona, Prato, the UK and Finland. ‘We did a lot of research to find these machines and these women. It takes a lot of skill to weave something like that. You can’t just have a junior weaver.’

For Gandini, it’s worth the wait. After trialling various formulas over a two-year period for her knitwear – itself a feat at the intersection of mathematics and art – she landed on the golden ratio for her crack team. In fact, many weavers she trialled refused to work on the concept for fear of destroying their machines. There’s also issues that come with the crafty territory. Each weaver’s work comes out differently. ‘Everyone has a different hand,’ she says. ‘The weavers now know – after doing it and doing it – how much tension to apply, but if one day one of them is a bit tired, it’s going to come out wrong, and she has to start from scratch.’

The pieces – hand-wrought and one-of-a-kind – reflect the weaving process. Hold them in one hand, and they’re heavy; but wear them, and they’re effortless. ‘I like the idea of this weight, because it's making a political statement, in a certain sense, regarding gender,’ says Gandini, whose studio has intentionally blended a traditionally masculine industry (metalwork) with a historically undervalued and feminised one (textiles). Indeed, the name itself is a play on the Bauhaus movement and the German word, nuller, which translates to ‘of little value’.

The thinking first came to Gandini while in her studies when she clocked that CSM’s weaving studio was only used by women. ‘I started to study the history of textiles, and I noticed that even at the Bauhaus, even though women could finally enroll, they were confined to the weaving studio,’ says Gandini. ‘Threads were considered easier to work with, and women are [stereotypically considered] more gentle, so they can only work with things that are softer, you know – all that kind of narrative.’

Haus Nuller is a sincere and thoughtful proposition, both for the fashion market and a more textile-led one, artfully reevaluating craft in a way that doesn’t rush to quick-buck demands. It’s also more than just a clothing label, open to a wide spectrum of opportunities. Recently, the studio worked as the upholstery consultant for B&B Italia’s contemporary re-edition of the 1958 ‘Catilina’ chair by Luigi Caccia Dominioni.

‘For me, Dominioni’s architecture is really line-based,’ she says. ‘It made me think of an artist called Willem Cole, who works only with lines and the three primary colours.’ Cole produced a series of drawings, and Gandini translated them into textiles. ‘You know, I don’t only love fashion,’ she says. ‘But I do think fashion is more fun. Upholstery has a lot of rules.’

Of course, rules – including the one to not incorporate metalwork into weaving – have sown the seeds of this potentially game-changing studio practice. For now, the plan is to only produce one collection per year while consulting and working on special projects. ‘I don't think we need more clothes,’ says Gandini. ‘But we do need more ideas.’

Haus Nuller, ‘Breaking the Chain’, Sestiere Dorsoduro 3907 30123, Venezia, Italy.

The collection will be available for viewings and purchase at Via Ludovica Settala 45, Milano 20124 on 20-21 May, 2026.

Also read: What to see at the Venice Biennale