A hat to shape, a print to compose, a piece of leather to transform, and then music. Sunday, September 27, in the spaces of Arci Bellezza in Milan, Dr. Martens brings With Bouncing Soles, a day that brings together music, craftsmanship and creativity. Different forms of energy for a day built around a simple question: what pushes us to make, create, move?
From 10am to 11pm, the historic Milanese space becomes a meeting point for a diverse community of artists, makers, performers and audience. It’s not a program to rush through, but a succession of moments where observing, trying and taking part become part of the same experience.
The day begins with a yoga session, conceived as a moment to slow down and find one’s center before entering the rhythm of the event. Then it’s the hands that take over, through a series of workshops centered on making and on the direct relationship with materials.
Among the protagonists are Jcosky Hats, which works on the hat as an artistic object and on the value of the time needed to make it; Blocchi Scomposti, with a workshop dedicated to the possibility of taking apart and reassembling shapes; and the Laboratorio Riciclo Pelle, which starts from waste materials to transform them into new objects. Three different approaches, united by the same idea: creating also means stopping, observing matter, and understanding how it can change and what it can still become.
Craftsmanship is not presented as something distant or only to be observed, but as a concrete activity, made of gestures, mistakes, attempts and transformations. The audience is therefore not just a spectator, but can step directly into the makers’ creative processes.
Three different ways of working with material
The central part of the day will be dedicated to the workshops, with three Milanese realities bringing into the event as many different ways of understanding hands-on making.
It starts with Laboratorio Riciclo Pelle, a Milanese atelier specialized in the artisanal working and recovery of leather. During the workshop, materials that have already had a first life become the starting point for creating new objects, through traditional techniques reinterpreted in a contemporary key. Here the artisanal gesture also coincides with a change of perspective: not looking at a material for what it once was, but for what it can still become.
With Jcosky Hats, founded by Isacco Zanon and Eliza Oanca, the protagonist is instead the hat, understood not just as an accessory but as a space for research into form and identity. The duo combines traditional millinery techniques with a contemporary language, turning the workshop into an occasion to experiment with materials and volumes and give a personal shape to the idea of headwear.
Finally, Blocchi Scomposti, a collaborative printmaking project founded by Lara Leru and Cecilia Valagussa, takes the audience inside a process where creating means, above all, composing. The two illustrators start from different graphic languages and make them coexist through modular compositions. In the workshop, participants will be able to create their own images using handmade stamps, building a print through layering and combination: an individual exercise that becomes, at the same time, part of a collective process.
Three practices, three materials and three different gestures. Recovering, shaping, combining. It is through these concrete actions that the event tries to tell the story of creativity not as something abstract, but as a process that passes through the hands and takes shape in the making.
From hands to words
In the afternoon the register changes and Giada Biaggi arrives, the protagonist of a stand-up comedy moment. Her ironic, unfiltered language brings another form of creativity into the event: the kind that comes from observing reality and the ability to turn it into storytelling, questioning habits, contradictions and the small paradoxes of contemporary life.
The day then closes with the music of Marta Del Grandi, artist and Italian ambassador for Dr. Martens. Her performance brings the event toward a more collective and immersive dimension, where sound becomes the meeting point for the people who have moved through the day. And it is precisely with Marta that the concept of movement takes on an even more personal form, because if during the workshops it passes through the hands and in the stand-up through words, in music it becomes rhythm, listening and presence.
More than an event to watch, With Bouncing Soles is therefore a day to be lived in movement, letting yourself be guided by curiosity, by hands, by words and by music.
Dr. Martens – With Bouncing Soles
Sunday, September 27, 2026
10:00 am–11:00 pm
Arci Bellezza, Via G. Bellezza 16/A, Milan
Attendance is free, but registration is required. Below you’ll find the links to register for the workshops and the links for the evening events on DICE.
Workshop: https://linktr.ee/c41mag
Giada Biaggi: https://link.dice.fm/rd7aba03ec88
Marta Del Grandi: https://link.dice.fm/Xe4618382112
