The fashion world reacts to the critical moment, due to Covid-19 pandemic, with typical Catholic contrition of forgiveness to the disaster caused by reckless globalization, promising “I don’t do it anymore, everything will change, we slow down, we think, we stick to the necessary values”.

The True Cost is a film of 2015! It seems to me that excessively late repentances are as true as crocodile tears. And above all, they do not show any vision except a series of fast and little feasible proposals. We are tied to technology if this progresses, and by this, I mean towards the human being, we too will be saved.

To say that nothing will be the same as before is of a disconcerting banality, of course, you never get wet twice in the same river.

The research dictates the way

How the change will take place we still cannot say. In the 1960s with the excitement of outer space, we waited for the Martians to land in the garden. They never came. But they generated high-profile fashion imagery that triggered still current styles. It was not the Martians, but the research that dictated the way.

An economy that collapses after only two months of the forced stop is based on fictitious relationships, not on real but on virtual finance.

We live by prejudices and only by image. A complaint that comes to us from long ago, from 1967 by Guy Debord’s Entertainment Society and then again from 1978 with Susan Sontag’s writings on image and capitalism. We fell in full.

The sense of awareness: I have a dream

Farewell Eden by Christian-Pontus Andersson – Larsen Warner gallery – Stockholm, Sweden

Now we will have to base the dynamics on knowledge, on consciousness and less on the image. Capitalism as we lived it is dead. Its replacement is still to be studied. It will be a slow and painful but necessary path, it is not enough to reconvert, rearrange, rearrange, but re-found.

We need progress, research, culture, poetry and dreams. When everything seems achievable, the dream disappears and with it the ability to have a vision, to be able to imagine. Yes, because knowing is imagining.

 

Alessandro Turci speaking

 

Studies in Law at the University of Turin and interests between Fashion and Contemporary Art. Fashion Designer and Art Director for international brands, he founded Risekult in Milan in 2012, Cultural Association for Contemporary Art and publishes the Art Book Risekult book of excellence for collectors. Curator of art exhibitions collaborates with galleries and museums. Contributing Editor for Flair Magazine, Thesignspeaking and for Officiel Homme with columns on Art and Fashion. He teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, at  IED Milan and Turin, at the Bicocca University in Milan.