The strongest of all attacks is colorful, theatrical, if not deliberately farcical. Not violent, maybe just a tad decadent. What strikes is the liberating urge of creating a visual play around a dress and a persona: one that can be immediately perceived as such. Fashion today is essentially about image-making, and young creatives are well aware of that. However, they do not treat clothing as just a simulacrum: they create fables with pieces that both look great in pictures and have a presence. It’s volume that prevails, creating narrative and spatial depth.
Dichotomy, anyway, is the true driving force of the present, making the pendulum swift in opposite directions at once. This, after all, is the era of the aut/aut and tertium non datur. So while the exploration of clothing as habitat suggests, partially, a stasis, the great outdoors keep on calling, demanding adventurous creations as self-sufficient living units. The strongest contrast, however, is the one that pits the organic against the synthetic; nature, imperfection, craft against the sleek, efficient, incorruptible perfection of the machine-made. Curiously, or rather not so curiously, it is nature that wins in this moment of everything cold and digital: a swarm of flowers or a flourish of feathers are enough to turn surfaces into living organisms, infusing life into bold architectural forms. It is exactly in these explorations that, finally, fashion regains its position in the current moment. There is in fact nothing that directly references the past or suggests anything too deliberately vintage. Retro is ditched in the name of progress, doing away with sampling and post-production.
Beauty, finally, remains a shared goal, even more so when traditional notions of it keep being consciously obliterated or eschewed. The fascination with the morbid and the decadent gives nuance to a deliberate quest for non-harmonic harmony. Even age is being consistently re-thought, in a serene acceptance of every season of life. All this makes for a brave and bound-less generation of political auteurs who skip open confrontation to delve into the honest pleasure of pure expression, operating each one in their own hyper-connected void. The esthetic, after all, is always deeply political.
Angelo Flaccavento