Fashion in Italy. Hate the sin, love the sinner

di Pietro Rebosio

“Do not ask us for the formula to unlock worlds for you” Eugenio Montale once wrote in Cuttlefish Bones. Do not ask for what is impossible to ask; do not pretend what is impossible to pretend. If the foreign press expresses disgust and contempt for our fashion industry (as it did during last MFW), I do not accept that they treat in the same way our designers. Both new and affirmed designers try to do what they can, that is express their own creativity using as a starting point what is around them. They use as a point of departure what surprise them, what knocks them to the ground. They use the environment in which they live or survive, willingly or unwillingly.  The landscape culturally dominates them. And the Italian landscape is grotesque, pathetic, depressing. I consider already an accomplishment the fact that designers still have the bravery to search for concepts and for moods able to inspire fashion collections during years as dark as ours. Years in which superficiality, pornography, and visual vulgarity are the ruling culture’s variables on which journalist and bloggers base theirs opinions, looking down on the collections while judging them not even knowing the distinction between neoclassic and rococo or between boucle and damasked. They should limit themselves to judge detergents and toothbrushes, and for sure not these poor designers bombarded by such superficial judgments. Italy lacks of culture but it does not lack of style. Italians have style to spare, differently from many others foreign designers considered as pagan gods and that are then only able to create horrors. Horrors then displayed under the eyes of everyone. Look for a moment to Mosquino’s trajectory, from Italian spirit’s icon (or in any case, from an icon of the “aware” Americanization) to French fries and happy meal.