A RITE THAT DOES NOT ADMIT REPLICAS
I have always thought the fashion show as a magical event capable of unleashing spells. A liturgical action that suspends the ordinary, charging it with a surplus of intensity. A procession of epiphanies and dilated thoughts that settle into one different partition of the sensitive.
In this party that feeds on expectation, my thought finds its shape and becomes public. Ties obsessions and anti-gravity thrusts. Stop on the improbable. Caress that human nostalgia that others call imperfection. Sews, with the precision of love, every little detail of the scene to offer it to a community of interpreters.
There is the enchantment of the gift, in this rite that does not allow replies. There is the promise of one precious delivery. The lights go out. The gatherers stand waiting with open hands. Everything is perfectly silent, to welcome my crooked beats and my vertigo. To this tribe of emancipated spectators I offer my poetry.
Let them question it deep. May they help me understand it. They can translate it or betray it. Use it to wake up dormant questions. Or simply reject it, in the absence of gates of compassion. The gift is living matter, a puzzle whose meaning belongs to no one.
Even today we will live this ritual, sacred to me. A procession of steps will draw the space, like chimes in the temple. Mysterious bastings will take their oath to light. A score of notes will magnify prophecies imprinted on moving bodies.
However, there is something that usually remains buried in this ceremony: the effort of parturient who accompanies the tremor of creation; the mother’s womb where poetry, from shape to shape, it blooms. So I decided to raise a veil on what he loves to hide. That miraculous of skilful hands and restrained breaths come out of the shadows.
Let it be done visible that collective intelligence that takes care of gestation, with rage that rages. That build a throne for that tattered and somewhat crazy beehive that I chose as home. Because that is the house that I venerate: the blessed passage through which beauty comes out of the shell.
Alessandro Michele
(Voice over) – Federico Fellini
A camera, some friends around willing to help me, a troupe, a troupe extraordinary. A troupe of circus performers. Of those who do the circus while doing show, they still do it while they take it apart and they are already leaving and also there departure becomes show.
It is, I said, perhaps a declaration of love in cinema, perhaps a a little too private, perhaps narcissistic, I repeat shameless, without limits. But, that’s what I did. The cinema that was just that, was hypnotic, ritualistic suggestion, that is, something religious.
We left the house, parked the car somewhere, then we went he lined all the rituals in processions: the ticket, the curtain that opened, the mask, look at the half-lit audience, recognize friends. Then this light that dims, the screen turns on and the revelation begins.
The message. An ancient ritual, always, in short, that changed shape and ways but it was always that: you are there to listen.
(more…)
Tags: FALL WINTER WOMEN 2020, GUCCI, GUCCI FW 2020
MASCULINE, PLURAL
In a patriarchal society, masculine gender identity is often moulded by violently toxic stereotypes. A dominant, winning, oppressive masculinity model is imposed on babies at birth. Attitudes, languages and actions end up progressively conforming to a macho virility ideal that removes vulnerability and dependence. Any possible reference to femininity is aggressively banned, as it is considered a threat against the complete affirmation of a masculine prototype that allows no divergencies.
There is nothing natural in this drift. The model is socially and culturally built to reject anything that doesn’t comply with it. And this has very serious implications. Toxic masculinity, in fact, nourishes abuse, violence and sexism. And not only that. It condemns men themselves to conform to an imposed phallocratic virility in order to be socially accepted. In other words, toxic masculinity produces oppressors and victims at the same time.
Therefore, it seems necessary to suggest a desertion, away from patriarchal plans and uniforms. Deconstructing the idea of masculinity as it has been historically established. Opening a cage. Throwing a chant. It’s time to celebrate a man who is free to practice self-determination, without social constraints, without authoritarian sanctions, without suffocating stereotypes. A man who is able to reconnect with his core of fragility, with his trembling and his tenderness.
A man on his knees in front of surrender, who honors fear and its thorns. A man full of kindness and care. A man who leans on others, who burns up the myth of self-sufficiency. A man who is also sister, mother, bride. A man swollen with disorder, who names blood’s ignition and nostalgia’s dismay. A man who complicates the weaving of his own affectivities, opening himself to non hierarchical relations. A baby man, able to do bold and playful somersaults, who wonders in amazement when the world becomes new. A man pregnant with broken chains.
It’s not about suggesting a new normative model, rather to release what was constrained. Breaking a symbolic order, which is nowadays useless. Nourishing a space of possibility where masculine can shake its toxicity off, to freely regain what was taken away. And, in doing this, turning back time, learning to unlearn.
(more…)
Tags: FALL WINTER MEN 2020, GUCCI, GUCCI FW 2020
Urban Romanticism
Cultivated through time and place and projected by experience and mood, individual style is the starting point of the Gucci Men’s Fall/Winter 2015-16 collection.
Visceral storytelling through fashion, the collection celebrates the idiosyncrasies that define personal style today. From a flourish of a chiffon bow to mink-lined men’s slippers to smatterings of signet rings, a dreamy ambiguity pulsates throughout.
An attitude not a silhouette; an experience not an era—the new collection is a point of departure that blurs the masculine/feminine divide and champions the youthful energy and natural confidence of today’s urbanites.
Contemporary non-conformists, modern romantics, they have hidden spots in every city and a shared intellectual curiosity that informs how they live and what they wear.
(more…)
Tags: FALL WINTER MEN 2015-16, GUCCI, GUCCI FW 2015-16
