Tarantate began with a question:
What happens when women reclaim the parts of themselves history taught them to suppress?

Desire. Sensuality. Instinct. Vitality. Creative force. Emotional truth.

The name Tarantate comes from Tarantata, women connected to the Southern Italian folk phenomenon known as Tarantism. According to folklore, a woman experienced the "illness" or "affliction" known as Tarantism when she was "bit" by a spider. The bite explained what folk and patriarchal societies struggled to make sense of…

Rage. Longing. Exhaustion. Sensuality. Erotic expression. Grief. Radiance…

…all simultaneously coveted and cornered by highly restrictive social structures, and then trapped beneath systems that often framed women’s emotional lives as irrational, excessive, or something to be controlled.

Essentially, emotions and expressions that exceeded what women were expected to contain. The movements that did not politely perform or restrain.

In moments of depression, anxiety, grief, emotional suffering, or internal unrest, the ritual of the bitten woman began. The community gathered around the sufferer. Her pain was not hidden from view or isolated into privacy. It belonged to the collective. Music and people filled the square. Rhythm swelled. Bodies moved until emotion traveled somewhere language could not reach. The healing itself was communal. The soul unloaded. People witnessed the spirit of a woman unleashed, and understood.

Within the Tarantate existed an understanding modern systems still struggle to recreate: healing can happen inside expression, movement, music, ritual, rhythm, witness, and collective care. In a world where women often suffered deeply in silence, the dance created a socially acceptable space to express grief, loneliness, rage, desire, sensuality, exhaustion, longing, and emotional intensity publicly, surrounded by community rather than shame.

Bodies became instruments that got every note played in the plaza. And the body expressed what language could not.

Historians, anthropologists, and feminist interpretations continue to examine Tarantism through multiple lenses: ritual healing, rites of passage, sexuality, puberty, emotional suffering, social oppression, collective care, and embodied resistance within patriarchal systems.

For some, Tarantism represented illness. For others, it was a healing ritual or rite of passage. For others still, something closer to a human process and the pathway to liberation.

For many, it was language of movement while being forced to live inside an oppressive world that demanded silence and complicity.

Tarantate draws from that inheritance.

There is an untamed nature inside every woman. Southern Italian or not. A force carried through generations, waiting to be remembered.

Shaped through Southern Italian culture, New York Italian immigrant lineage, and contemporary womanhood, Tarantate transforms cultural memory into modern luxury wear that moves with you.

Each collection begins with a story. Some emerge from lineage, archetypes, or women whose lives altered culture.

All draw from those who carried pieces of themselves across generations and reimagined them through modern life.

A conversation between Italy and New York in the context of the modern world.

Between inheritance and autonomy, memory and becoming, lineage…

and whatever legendary creations come next.