Haitian-Italian Designer Stella Jean to present her ethical Spring/Summer 2014 collection at the Teatro Armani, His Bergognone show space.

During Milan Fashion Week, Stella Jean — a resident of Rome — is set to show at the 550-seat Teatro Armani, the first women’s wear designer so honored, other than the emperor himself.

The show is scheduled to start at 10.30am start on Saturday, September 21, 2013, which, while sandwiched nicely in the calendar between Emporio Armani on Friday and Giorgio Armani on Monday, pits it against a considerable challenger. Saturday morning during Milan Fashion Week, you see, the sacred time for “shoe appointments,” a euphemism for shopping. Yet the buzz around “the new Stella” is such that the front-row seat are confirming attendance in Bergognone rather than Monte Napoleone.

Alta Roma’s elegant talent scout Simonetta Gianfelici helped to turn things around for Stella Jean, advising her to “be more sincere; do something that belongs only to you.” Stella Jean (her surname, though she doesn’t use it professionally, is Novarino) is half-Italian and half-Haitian. “I had struggled to find my identity,” she says. “I found it through my work. I put my two worlds together and found the fashion I was looking for.”

She calls her unique vision “Wax & Stripes” — the latter for a father who hailed from industrial Turin and the former “for the black side of me, the black roots of the Caribbean islands.”

Stay turned as Amour Creole continue coverage from the Milan fashion week.