Great article IMO, completely corresponds to what I've been thinking about Italy.
Italian Fashion in the Time of the Trollop
Italian Fashion in the Time of the Trollop
Milan
IN Italy nobody drives in the slow lane, colloquially called the
lane of shame. So it?s somewhat of a mystery why the Italian fashion
industry, one of the primary engines of the Italian economy, continues
to putter along year after year doing 50 while China, Eastern Europe,
India and ? aesthetically if not economically ? even France go whizzing
past.
In terms of volume of production, Italy remains a force, one
illustration of this being the sheer scope of the seasonal fashion
weeks here. No fewer than 228 runway shows are noted in Milan?s
official seven-day calendar; a free fashion handout thicker than a
?Bleak House? paperback lists 61 solidly packed pages of showrooms that
are open to buyers and the press.
Yet to be honest, there are no more than a handful of shows that
anyone cares about or that the ever-expanding posse of international
press and buyers has come to Milan eager to see.
At this point there is Bottega Veneta. There is Jil Sander. There is
Prada. There is Gucci. (Maybe also Marni.) Two of these are designed by
Italians (the others are designed by a German and a Belgian,
respectively), and at this point Miuccia Prada is as ambivalent about
national identity as one can be and still qualify for a passport.
Beginning last year, Ms. Prada made even clearer the shakiness of her
allegiance to what?s termed the Italian fashion system when she packed
up her Miu Miu show and started staging it in Paris.
What happened? Designers like Armani, whose brands are now global
behemoths, once also dominated the aesthetic side of the fashion
business. Why does Italy seem like it was run off the road?
?Italy has a big, big problem, which is that there is no
generational change,? said Ennio Capasa, the designer of Costume
National, a respected but largely commercial label that is, in typical
eccentric fashion, commemorating its 21st anniversary this year.
?Designwise, factorywise, in terms of the bureaucracy, we?re behind.?
It is not just, as many suggest, that Italy, long renowned for its
textiles, its handcrafts and its high aesthetic standards, has lost
large hunks of its manufacturing market to Eastern Europe, China and
India. Plenty of people here will tell you that the China experiment
has not necessarily worked out. Cheap foreign copies of Italian luxury
goods are fine, but not fine enough, apparently, to satisfy the trained
eyes and high expectations of people spoiled by the access they?ve
always had to the best artisans around, workers whose skills have been
transmitted across centuries.
You don?t hear the word used explicitly, but the quality missing
from fashion here now is what Italians refer to as raffinatezza, or
refinement. This is not a small detail in a country historically
defined almost entirely by its visual culture. What has replaced it in
part is the tackiness and vulgarity of which America once claimed the
dominant market share. American pop culture at this point is largely
vapid and formless. What is Paris Hilton but a cloud of pastel
ectoplasm, its molecules barely sticky enough to hold form?
Italian pop culture produces its own manifestations, one being the
careers of the designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, whose
status as media deities owes less to their design skills than to their
genius for tapping into a youth culture just as dumb as its American
counterpart but visually definable in terms of hardness, or what?s
called here durezza.
Let other designers make clothes that look chic or classy. Dolce
& Gabbana seems satisfied to have built a nearly $1 billion
privately owned company on the sartorial wisdom of the ragazzi, the
street kids, dressing a generation that, as is often reported, reads
perhaps a book a year and watches more television daily (240 minutes on
average) than almost any other similar population in Europe.
It was the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini who first pronounced doom
on Italy?s aesthetic and moral standards based on the decadence he saw
emanating from the boob tube. But that was eons before the former prime
minister Silvio Berlusconi
created his mediagarchy, before Domenico and Stefano became television
regulars, before the country?s biggest porn star, Rocco Siffredi,
became a snack foods huckster featured in commercials for Amica potato
chips whose tag line uses a double entrendre that is slang for a part
of the female anatomy.
Like most eggheads of the period, Pasolini decried the vulgarization
of culture by the ubiquitous new medium. Yet in Pasolini?s day, Italy
could still be said to have a vital literary, artistic and cinematic
scene to counter the television?s evil rays. Even the applied forms
like fashion then embodied an image of Italy as a holdout of refined
tradition and Italians as the guardians and arbiters of patrician ways.
That this fantasy has not altogether faded can be seen in the press
obsession with Lapo Elkann, reprobate grandson of Gianni Agnelli, the
former Fiat chief. Despite repeated drug binges, stints in rehab, his
overdose in the apartment of a middle-aged transvestite, Mr. Elkann is
invariably seen as a paragon of elegance. Mostly this is because he
wears his grandfather?s clothes.
There is a particularly Italian message in the fact that, no matter
what kind of antics Mr. Elkann gets up to, his inherited hand-me-downs
possess the magical power to restore him to moral rectitude.
It?s this raffinatezza that seems to have gone, either leaving the
country or ignored by designers whose idea of fashion is a
leopard-print frock for a trollop-slash-starlet or the 99th iteration
of whiskered jeans.
?I?m not sure it will ever come back,? Mr. Capasa of Costume
National said, referring to the refinement of Italian fashion and the
sense of Italy as a generator of style and innovative ideas. ?At the
top level of power, there are just a few brands left,? and, he added,
very little space left for either traditional labels or new blood.
?They have to embrace the future,? Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor,
said at the Armani show on Monday, referring to the Camera Nazionale,
the trade group that regulates the Italian fashion industry. Slow to
promote novelty or young designers, the group has been accused of being
old-fashioned, resistant, entrenched.
?There are wonderful, talented people here, but it?s always the
same names,? Ms. Wintour said. ?Where is the support? Where is the
sponsorship? You have to embrace the future of fashion and look for the
next generation.?
And if that doesn?t happen, it is no stretch to imagine a day when
the fast-lane folks who run global fashion will decide to skip the
Milan exit in their haste to find the next great place.
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