Magliano (Q3252)
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Magliano is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Magliano |
Magliano is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
2017
founder and creative director
Success hasn’t changed Luchino Magliano’s almost visceral approach to what he does; his voice is becoming even more radical—and political, if you can read between the lines. His fashion still comes from a place of raw discomfort. Pain, insubordination, and anger are distilled into the feel of gaunt detachment his shows convey—the impetus of a (dysfunctional) volcano buried under thin ice.“Memories hit you without warning like shards or thunderstorms,” he said at a preview. The roar of thunder opened today’s show, a riotoussaladeof archeological reminiscences “finally intimate, not just personal,” as Magliano put it. He has a way with the emotional nuances of wording, and with supremely blasé, deceptively insouciant dressing. He’s actually a renegade aristo playing working-class hero.By his own admission, Magliano is lowering his guard, letting family memories in, and being much more explicit and upfront in championing his queer community. “I’ve kept my voice low, like a mutter or a whisper,” he said. “But not anymore. I guess I have matured. Growing as a person and as a company hasn’t been easy at all. But the reason I started all this in the first place was to have a fucking voice. I’d be an idiot if I wasn’t using it.”In the collection, more stringent and concise than usual without losing its flair for the languidly seditious, traces of Magliano’s political stance were sparsely woven throughout, like crumbs left in the woods to find your way home. String of Google searches on porn, on Emily Dickinson’s poetry and the tragic, bloody police aggressions in 2001 against student demonstrations during the G8 in Genoa were embroidered onto the lapels and the trouser belts of a slouchy, debonair black suit. On a white waistcoat, the image of Pinocchio (“a queer hero”) engaging rather overtly in cruising activities was printed in stark black and white. Sex and the body were definitely on Magliano’s agenda, “they have to be addressed with no shame or judgment, because it’s who we are,” he said. Chemsex and its arsenal of lab tools were transmuted into a hazy, allusive print, inspired by Bolognese artist Giorgio Morandi’s melancholicnature mortes“that spoke about the silence surrounding objects.” Pier Paolo Pasolini “on set while he was filmingMedea” was referenced in a look where a lived-in, unassuming shirt was twisted and knotted, worn open and tucked into short shorts. A workwear apron was made into a tight-fitting top in nude latex.
Magliano is about twisting classics into “crazy new functions.” There were plenty of surreal, and rather humorous, twisting and knotting in the collection. Coats were integrated with beach towels; trousers could be rolled up to become swimsuits; the hems of blazers were curled up and intertwined with no apparent reason; the hem of a double-breasted suit’s lapel was knotted into a smaller inflatable balloon. “We give you new opportunities for madness,” said Magliano. “I want to specialize in trans-formative objects.”Underneath the need to disturb and provoke, there’s a touching naïveté that makes Magliano endearing. The feminine gesture of cross-stitching brought back memories of the little tableaux his mother embroidered when she was a kid. He reprised some cross-stitching motifs on a couple of knitted twin-sets, made in collaboration with designer Jezabelle Cormio. Other fellow creatives—Francesco Risso, Veronica Leoni, Niccolò Pasqualetti, Adrian Appiolaza—rooted for him, cheering from the front row.
17 June 2024
Luchino Magliano’s inaugural show was held at Pitti Uomo five years ago. Models walked around a heap of red roses, a sort of totem signaling the potent romanticism that still imbues the designer’s ethos and aesthetic. Today’s show in Florence marked a homecoming for the designer; it was staged in the vast Nelson Mandela Forum, a popular venue for concerts, sports, and events, which Magliano somehow managed to immerse in his trademark dark, moody atmosphere.This time, the heap of roses was replaced by a different totem: a grand staircase that acted as a reference to camp, cinematic glamour, and as a sort of political metaphor between high and low, top and bottom, hellish abysses of social despair and heavenly altitudes of privilege. As Magliano put it, “the ladder is a device of strain, but also embeds the idea of the queerkermesse.”The monumental architectural staircase of Rome’s Campidoglio filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky in his 1983 movie Nostalghia featured on the show’s moodboard—nostalgia intended not as a passive sentiment of longing, but rather as the burning desire for something lost that activates emotional intensity. It’s a feeling that has reverberated in Magliano’s practice from day one, together with a cocky sense of nerve. It’s a passionate, defiant inner posture that he shares with the late feminist lesbian poet Patrizia Cavalli, whose chic portrait wearing a boyish oversized turtleneck was also plastered on the moodboard, together with images of Italian actress Anna Magnani and the German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven.It wasn’t a coincidence that all the references were female. “It has to do with the way we interpret the concept of ‘classic’ as an overextended feminine form,” said Magliano. “Being at Pitti means reflecting on the idea of classic, and our take is feminine, a sort of new neutral that belongs to gay identities and to the queer culture. As designers, I strongly believe we have the responsibility of addressing the binary discourse, of liberating the wardrobe from binary stereotypes.”Fluidity, a sense of undoneness, melton details almost dissolving within garments; volumes collapsing with voluptuous contentment, colors as elusive and foggy as those found in Giorgio Morandi’s eerily serenenature mortepaintings—the collection was a joyous sabotage of familiar staples and shapes, unfolding at a calm, yet intense pace. “We interpret the classics taking chaos into consideration,” he explained.
Collaborations with custodians of radical Italian savior faire put Magliano’s iconoclastic spirit to the test. Workshops with the Neapolitan master tailors at Kiton provided a couple of slouchy-chic hand-crafted suits, while hat maker Borsalino was called in to create a few quirky hats. “Worlds apparently allergic to one another can bring about a progressive cultural and visual exchange,” philosophized the designer.The two male references Magliano addressed were Giorgio Armani and Leonardo da Vinci. “Armani is the only designer who has done a consistent take on the non-binary wardrobe, treating the masculine and the feminine as overlapping elements mixing with each other with supreme ease—we find it utterly pertinent and necessary today,” he explained. As for Da Vinci, he’s a queer icon, as he divided his private life between a female and a masculine partner. Magliano introduced a graphic that read, “Leonardo, she’s one of us.” “It isn’t a provocation, but a gesture of liberation,” he said. “I wanted to liberate him/her from the binary weight of history.”
10 January 2024
Luchino Magliano is in the eye of the storm—and it seems to be a pretty good storm. Bringing home the Karl Lagerfeld Award at this year’s LVMH Prize (which he shared ex-aequo with Julie Pelipas’s Bettter) is a life-changing experience. He’s surfing the (unexpected) swell of recognition with the emotional nerve that has made him survive the wild rollercoaster ride that’s part of every young designer’s journey.“It’s a beautiful thing to be seen,” was his impromptu acceptance speech at the Prize; today’s show reiterated this sentiment. In a first for Magliano, he staged his spring collection on a catwalk, elevated from the ground “to be better seen by our people, to whom we’re incredibly grateful,” he said. “It takes lots of courage to acknowledge the desire to be seen. It’s an incredibly hard effort, even for a die-hard narcissist.”The collection was put together before the prize, and had the same integrity and honesty that are part of Magliano’s ethos. “Our brand has always been a sort of ‘citationist’ project, in the sense that it has been generated in my hometown Bologna, is deeply imbued with its underground culture and my own experience,” he offered. “The personalities and characters we’ve been working with since day one are ethical symbols of certain beliefs and behaviors, either social or personal.”Despite its young life, Magliano has already established a repertoire strong enough to be considered a style. In the show, best-ofs were re-enacted into “sharp, dry statements,” as the designer called them. The label’s “banal objects”—bombers, technical windbreakers, workwear garments, Sunday-best tailoring, worn-out denim—were given a ‘come to see me’ attitude, transformed into a sort of “wretched couture,” that longs to be considered a radical, drastic, impudent paradox.Voile trailing trains; plays of attention-seeking draping; tight knots drawing the eye to hems and necklines; provocative transparencies; bombers that become sneaky stoles; dramatic scarves pocketed as utility cargos; bags that wrap around the body; a “blazer looking for holiness” intended to celebrate women; ephemeral silly hats “because in the end what we’re looking for is a roof over our heads.” Magliano’s genderless codes have evolved into a raw yet highly sophisticated manifesto that pays homage to its queer roots. “Our obsession has always been to deconstruct the male identity as we know it; that’s why we started doing what we do,” said the designer.
“It’s an act of pure joy—joyfully crushing a certain idea of the masculine.”
18 June 2023
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” could be a fitting headline for Luchino Magliano’s trajectory in fashion; after years of under-the-radar struggles he has recently received much deserved backing from a group of young investors. At today’s show the indomitable fighting spirit that has fueled his creativity from day one seemed to be still pretty intact. Sitting in the cavernous dark space of the show, held in the underbelly of a school, with a huge wall of stacked chairs as rather ominous backdrop, he said, “this time we have chosen a less challenging location because we wanted to be a little more hospitable towards our guests, but not too much.” Making people slightly uncomfortable is just one of Magliano’s many charms.“I’m afraid this collection is a bit tough,” he said. Not that previous ones were a breezy walk in the park, really. So what’s the difference with this one? “It’s a really somber, gloomy collection. It’s gray, it’s melancholy. It’s shrouded in shadows, but it isn’t sad or desperate. It just comes from an inner place, it looks inward, like this venue, we wanted to represent aluogo interiore, an inner ground.”The theme of the collection was No by Magliano. In the show, it screamed as a manifesto from the back of a gray tailored blazer—a logo of protest, a slogan that “wants you to remember not to be complacent,” the designer said, “because life brings you to say yes most of the time, to accept and bend, but it’s vital to learn to say no. It’s an affectionate no, joyful and beautiful. But it’s a no.” If anyone thinks that success will change Magliano’s mindset, making him content to meekly oblige to rules and regulations, well, better think again.That said, the new investments in his brand will bring obvious benefits: higher production standards, the potential to grow online and at retail, etc. This collection already boasted subtle improvements in execution, while the signature Magliano look stayed firmly in place. He said: “The No by Magliano slogan translates into tempestuous drapings, garments that are fragile or protective, every expedient that can make them twist, modify, knot, tie, shrink, wring has been explored, in an almost absurd way. It’s a heart-wrenching collection.” Calling Magliano a romantic is clearly an understatement.
16 January 2023
Luchino Magliano doesn’t care about making people slightly uncomfortable; it’s part of his rough (yet considerable) charm, which extends to the collections he designs. To get his poetically provocative message across, he’d go the extra mile—sometimes quite literally, as was the case today, when he had editors and buyers trekking all the way to the south-eastern outskirts of Milan to a dilapidated building located near the city’s vast landfill area.In person, Magliano comes across as very intense; there’s not an inch of detachment in his bones, and everything he says or does comes from a visceral place of deep, passionate feelings. Provocation is filtered by poetry and by a finesse of spirit which is as fierce as it is delicate; that’s what makes him unique in a fashion landscape where narrations are sometimes washed-out or spurious.“After the last collection, which was nocturnal and dark, this one felt like a new dawn, a moment of emotional rebirth and new beginnings, a change of skin which is necessary to mature,” he said. “Dawn turns into light, and brightness can wash away all the beautiful dreams the night has brought to our consciousness. It’s a metaphor of growing up, a journey that can be melancholy and even painful.”The idea of the journey has always appealed to romantic souls like Magliano, and the collection was infused with the nomadic hippie spirit intrinsic to his label’s ethos, translated into variously iterated renditions of the fluid, cool pajama dressing which is becoming a style staple. Tailoring had a liquid, slouchy quality to it, with sensual plays on layering adding intrigue to the silhouette; the muted color palette (Magliano called it “penumbra”) rhymed with opaque textures glimmering with subtle shines. Upcycled surplus shirts with vintage tropical souvenir motifs were repurposed, re-dyed and reconfigured into trompe-l’oeil blazer linings, or knotted and braided loosely around jackets.Hidden under the sensuality and the stylish decadence of the garments, Magliano’s political provocateur spirit still lurked, ready to resurface. Talking about the introduction of elements of workwear into the collection, he was quick to point out that “it isn’t the kind of mainstream, polished and detoxed workwear we know; rather it references the honest way it’s experienced by the working class heroes whose culture I want to honor in my practice, and in all the choices I make.
” Conviction and fierce beliefs are what are needed today to give fashion true purpose and meaning.
19 June 2022
By his own admission, Luchino Magliano is a melancholy nocturnal animal, a disposition various quarantines have only exacerbated. No wonder that his fall collection was tinged with “a lunar quality, a melancholy elegance, a sort of spleen,” he said.Tuning into a romantic mode sounded like a sort of Byronesque U-turn for the usually peacocky, brash, sexual Magliano’s style proclivities—but no. Underneath layers of languor, a clash of energies was apparently raging : “Introspection and solitude, I’ve been through a hard path really,” he said. “But I had to make peace with who I am and what I want to express.” He didn’t exactly call the process cathartic, yet what emerged was a desire for “a certain sobriety of style—but no less eccentric.” The leopard doesn’t change its spots so easily.As far as eccentric references go, it’s hard to beat the extraordinary personality of Italian artist and performer Luigi Ontàni, who was born near Bologna, which is Luchino Magliano’s birthplace and whose subversive underground ’80s culture is still a sort of cultural umbilical cord for the designer. Ontàni usually dressed flamboyantly for the everyday in pink felted suits or turquoise pajamas: “He was a vision when he walked in his small hometown, past the cafés where old people were killing time playing cards; he looked like a unicorn,” reminisced Magliano, fascinated by the artist’s poetry and the sense of wonder he elicited wherever he went.To capture the same feel of surprise in the collection, Magliano played subtly with contrasts, juxtaposing materials like felted wool (“a melancholy fabric, poor and protective and made for carpenters”) to brocades, Lurex, silks embroidered with crystals (“nocturnal and lunar, like moonbeams in the dark”). Indulging his sensualist side, they were rendered into soft-tailored suiting and into roomy, languid outerwear of fluid proportions, worn nonchalantly in layers. Oversized blazers were supple and slouchy like sweaters or made in padded corduroy “to give the sense of an embrace,” with linings transforming into protective anoraks or quilted with eco-furred trimmings.As an additional layer to the already dense narrative, the show was staged at Milan’s Circolo Arci Bellezza, a cultural space made famous by movie director Luchino Visconti, who filmed the boxing scene inRocco and His Brothersthere. Magliano’s idea of a boxing ring is that of a bed, where at night dreams and nightmares collide.
He had a vintage brass version smack in the middle of a room, with models slowly walking around it before stepping insouciantly on its clean white sheets. A strong image, “gently thrashing something immaculate with something heavy and raw,” said Magliano. Better to refrain from overly psychoanalytical interpretations.
16 January 2022
The pandemic and its restrictions was as tough for Luchino Magliano as it was for other independent designers. “To say that it has been challenging is an understatement,” he confirmed on a Zoom call. “It was more a sort of survival roller coaster, really. But I don’t want to complain—it’s so not interesting.”Magliano launched his brand in 2016. The next year he won first prize at theVogueItalia Who Is on Next? competition. He made a big splash in the stagnant waters of the Italian menswear scene, quickly gaining a cult following. The Magliano look is rooted in the gay ’80s counterculture of Bologna, the designer’s birthplace. Equally crucial to the brand narrative is the vernacular of social rituals in the Italianprovincia—a cultural mix of folklore, rural traditions, and a postwar industrial mentality. “I want to celebrate the beauty of the elegance of ordinary people,” he said. “I know that it might sound like a leftover folktale from another time. But the Italianprovinciais a totally different anthropological reality from, say, the suburbs. It’s a fascinating social and cultural web of popular rituals, typical of the emotional landscape that is Italy.”Part romantic, part provocateur, with a side dose of self-mocking humor, Magliano’s spirit is fed by a process of layered research and unorthodox references, which manifest differently in each of his collections. “For spring, inspiration was elusive, as my emotional state during lockdowns had been troubled and restless,” he explained. “I basically let my neurotic pandemic temperament take over. Bouncing from one contradictory emotion to another, I decided to investigate the theory of the four human temperaments as told by Hippocrates.”The ancient Greek physician produced the famous humoral theory, in which he described four different human fluids influencing behaviors: melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric. Magliano translated each temperament into clothes via a design process that included strict tailoring techniques diluted and adulterated with upcycling and haphazard handcrafted interventions.The melancholic wardrobe featured outfits with a rather neutral, technical inspiration. Think workwear all-in-ones in rough canvas, with plenty of pockets that here were filled incongruously with printed silk wraps for “emergencies.” (“They have to do with semiotic signifiers of nomadism more than with functional appliances,” was the enigmatic explanation.
) The sanguine temperament was rendered through what the designer calledvestiti innamorati(“enamored clothing”), i.e., shirts and trousers made entirely out of upcycled silk foulards printed in outlandish configurations, or else including elements of classic macho underwear to give off an erotic vibe.The phlegmatic section included sharply tailored suits cut from soft jacquard knitwear; Magliano called them “spiritual.” Last but not least, the choleric temperament was conveyed through classic blazers lined with an intricate mash-up of old T-shirts, which seemed to explode from within the jackets. “It was our representation of the rage and frustration we’ve experienced during lockdowns,” he said.The same feelings were metaphorically yet effectively expressed in the collection’s video. In the void of a stark white background, the Magliano posse tries to march ahead but has to overcome giant gusts produced by an enormous wind machine, to quite hilarious effect. Directed by Tommaso Ottomano, with the help of movement designer Michele Rizzo and a soundtrack improvised by 12-year-old drummer Edoardo Lovazzi, it felt quite uplifting, despite the discomfort it wanted to convey. Definitely, it was one of the best videos of Milan’s men’s Fashion Week.
22 June 2021