“I’m trying to think. I don’t even know what I own that’s black,” says the designer Julian Taffel. “I think I have one black mock neck — but I wear it with a green cardigan.”

It’s fitting, then, that along with Paolina Leccese, Taffel has created Leorosa, a knitwear brand sprung from the pair’s own bright, magpie-eyed aesthetic. They reference their grandparents’ wardrobes, as well as music by the ’70s Italian pop diva Patty Pravo and films by the directors Lina Wertmüller and Eric Rohmer as inspirations for their vibrantly contrasting, Italian-made knits. “There’s a very French, always-on-holiday look that we like,” Taffel says.

Taffel, 27, and Leccese, 28, met as students at the Parsons School of Art and Design in New York, and when they graduated in 2015, they both went on to work for the antiques dealer Emilie Irving in her curiosity-filled store Xenomania in Manhattan’s East Village. Though Taffel is now based in New York and Leccese lives between Milan and Cologne, Germany, when they meet, they scour vintage shops and flea markets — the one in Assago in Milan is a favorite — on the lookout for trinkets and knits. “The cardigans we like have a sort of grandmother shape,” Leccese says. With Leorosa, “we basically wanted to take that and make it modern.”