figures of speech is an Italian-founded fashion house based in Australia, built at the intersection of faith, art and design.

The story begins long before the house had a name.

Samuele Lo Bocchiaro was born into a traditional Italian stonemasonry family, surrounded by craftsmanship, material and the discipline of making things by hand. Born in Palermo and raised in Verona, his visual language was shaped by Italian art, architecture and the independent boutiques that surrounded him growing up.

“Fashion had always been an instinct — an obsession with silhouette, proportion and the way clothing could communicate without speaking.”

Giorgia Bellini followed a different creative path. With a background in languages, she developed an interest in photography and visual storytelling, eventually finding her own expression behind the lens.

Nearly a decade ago, Samuele and Giorgia left Italy and began a new life in Australia. What followed was not a conventional path into fashion. They worked, built a life together and continued pursuing their respective creative disciplines — Samuele through fashion and Giorgia through photography.

Then something began to change.

Samuele felt God placing the vision for figures of speech on his heart. What had existed as a lifelong attraction to fashion began to take the form of a calling.

The name itself carries that foundation. figures of speech connects Samuele’s faith, the figurative language through which Jesus often communicated, the Italian instinct for expressing ideas through metaphor, and his relationship with contemporary art.

From that moment, Samuele and Giorgia began building the house together.

In 2024, the direction of the house changed profoundly.

After experiencing a miraculous healing within their family, Samuele and Giorgia were drawn into a deeper relationship with Jesus. The experience became a defining moment, not only personally, but creatively.

What had been built before no longer felt aligned with where God was leading the house, and they made the decision to remove the previous body of work and begin again.

From that moment, a new vision began to take shape.

For Collection 3, they felt led to create twelve looks, reflecting the twelve apostles, and to present them through THE UPPER ROOM in Sydney — a runway experience centred around a reinterpretation of the Last Supper.

The idea became foundational to the new direction of the house. As Jesus gathered twelve apostles and began forming the early Church around Himself, Samuele and Giorgia understood the twelve looks as a symbolic beginning for a new chapter of figures of speech one with Christ at its centre.

What followed reinforced that conviction. The funds required to complete the collection and realise the show came together in a way they describe as miraculous, allowing a vision that had seemed beyond their circumstances to become reality.

Collection 3 therefore became more than another season. It marked a reset for the house — a point from which faith would no longer sit alongside the creative process, but become inseparable from it.

Since then, every collection has begun with meaning before it becomes form. Prayer, Scripture, architecture and lived experience are translated into silhouette, fabric and proportion. The intention is not to place Christian symbolism onto clothing as decoration, but to allow the message itself to shape the garment.

Samuele leads the creative direction and design of the house, while Giorgia contributes through image, storytelling and the visual world surrounding each collection.

Today, figures of speech continues to grow from Australia while remaining deeply connected to its Italian roots.

The house exists in an ongoing process of building, refining and responding , creating a language of its own through fashion, with Christ at the centre, while seeking to reflect God’s plan and purpose for humanity.