Long ago a foreign newspaper – by heart, the New York Times – published a hilarious article on the Italian abuse of the term contamination to indicate, in the language of fashion, the fusion of genres, signs, ways. The Treccani Encyclopedia actually authorizes this dictation as a “fusion of elements of different origins in the composition of a literary work”.
In translation, it can therefore be applied to fashion, with all due respect to the English-speaking purists. It must be done, because contamination, understood as much as an operation of pastiche and translation, as a pathogenic action that alters the starting DNA, is a key element of contemporary fashion communication. Forever suffering from an inexplicable inferiority complex, stylists, brands and fashion houses particularly aspire to dialogue, get dirty and appropriate what art does.
In the second chapter, a psycho-sensorial-aesthetic experience
The second episode, after the debut last year in Shanghai, is Valentino Resignify, the exhibition project, curated by Mariuccia Casadio and Jacopo Bedussi, which models the redesign of the Valentino codes by the creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli (in summary, the contextualization of the brand in an urban horizon, no longer in the Latin American latifundium and in the ancestral palace that belonged to Garavani himself) in a psycho-sensorial-aesthetic experience, making use of the involvement of different artists and media, from electronic images to music, photography, with prominent names such as Nick Knight, Jonas Mekas, Robert del Naja and Cao Fei.
Housed from 17 October to 7 November at the T-10 of SKP South, Resignify Pt.II is described in the presentation text as “a rationally open structure that does not provide for a one-way use but invites you to get lost, to explore, following what everyone perceives as attractive ». A path in which «the VLogo Signature, the Stud, the Atelier and the very personal meaning that Pierpaolo Piccioli gives to the word Couture are manifested as lysergic mirages».
An operation that mixes art, products, creativity and commerce
To review such an operation from a distance, in which the spectator is an active and integral part of the event, is in fact difficult. The connections suggested between clothes, accessories and works are, in fact, suggestions, and as such extremely personal. However, it is worth analyzing, beyond the intellectualism of manner and smoke signals, the sense of an operation that unscrupulously mixes the art exhibition with the exhibition of products – from make-up to very high creations such as the couture of maison – because it is an extremely disruptive contamination: window dressing and art, commerce and culture intertwine and overlap, with apparent disregard for by now outdated protocols, of purism at this point Jurassic, of restraining intellectual rigor.