When we talk about fashion we often confuse the term with clothing. Or we mix fashion with the fashion market that, like every commodification, looks at the profit and not quality. Words like creativity, genius, luxury, exclusivity, elegance, refinement are wasted in the comments now dictated by the convenience of good relations, not public… that the press entertains with the companies that sponsor the fashion magazines. The consideration should come from the competence in knowing how to discern what is fashion and what is not. To fuel this confusion the illusory perspective of the fashion schools, the big business of the last decades and of the thousands of students indoctrinated with marketing and “creativity”. we are depressed still making the same names, the same references of those who have made fashion great with revolutionary research. The terrible levelling of the avant-gardes now no longer rebels but shared, transforms the gesture into “like”, the opposition into a trend. So it happens that the banality is confused with creativity by lowering the threshold of attention on those “political” messages that fashion conveys. Not enough, too many catwalking can’t substitute quality with quantity. Family, age, identity are interesting topics if expressed with modern thinking beyond gender clichés, stylist’s tendencies, and the search for sensationalism to dazzle the audience gossip addicted. To consider ourselves human and not gay or straight is not to have an extraordinary openness of mind. To think that democracy is to consider equal persons is an inaccuracy. “We are all the same except those who are different”. Seeing old age as a period of life that needs an expression of madness is a bit like thinking that the disablement on the catwalk is a trend. What’s wrong if the image causes a sensation? The answer for those who saw the movie “The Square” is clear. When we then witness the presentation so obvious even to those who are not accustomed to certain shrewdness as a consummate designer, we remain irritated by the lack of consideration of our understandable reaction. Fashion is research, revolution, investigation into alien territories. Undoubtedly a forward-looking vision that opens up to new aesthetic, technological and dynamic considerations. A way to rethink in the post-computational era what has remained of our body between organic and synthetic, new prosthetic organism. Alessandro Turci speaking photos courtesy of Dolce&Gabbana
