Paolo Carzana (Q3561)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Paolo Carzana is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Paolo Carzana |
Paolo Carzana is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
In all of London Fashion Week, the tiniest, almost-off-grid, lowest-budget, handmade happening that Paolo Carzana held in his back garden will surely be chalked up as one of those magically significant moments that people talk about for years.This was in Carzana’s rented, shared flat in a terraced suburban house in East London—a very far cry from Kensington, where the official LFW wrap party was about to take place on glamorous roof gardens. Martine Rose has been famous, and loved, for taking large international audiences off to experience London neighborhoods, of course. But Carzana went even beyond that: just 70 guests packed on benches around the backyard that his parents had spent August clearing. He’d turned his and his boyfriend’s bedroom into the prep room, persuaded the landlord it would be okay, and asked the neighbors if they’d help with lighting from their windows. Down the road, the local pub got involved by hosting the hair and makeup team.He didn’t do it to be snobby or exclusive, he said, but because “I feel so out of place with all this idea of coolness. I just care about the clothes and the making and the creation of it. It’s also an attempt, I guess, to try to make everyone understand how special these moments are for us in fashion. To completely remove the smoke and mirrors and show, and make your own miracles.”Just after dusk, a poignant succession of people in fragile, knotted, plant-dyed tatters walked slowly through his back door. The first, a lad wearing a bunched-up shirt, gray trousers, and a draped medieval-seeming cap, walked down the garden steps, knelt in front of a pond, and paused to gaze at his reflection.He was striking the classical pose of Narcissus, of course. Carzana had seen Caravaggio’s painting of the boy who fell in love with the sight of himself in a pond. But the opening of this ethereal drama was different from the original legend because, while making clothes that you’ve never seen before, Carzana is also a writer of his own mythologies and a spinner of hope in precarious, frightening times.It was his metaphor for the source of today’s dystopian reality: “This is reflective of the hell that we’re living in. This complete move to that old, old sentiment of humanity, of vanity, of caring about what you look like, and not caring about the world around you. There are so many really awful wars and hunger, and endless, endless reasons to give up, really. It’s so hard to keep optimistic.
” So, in Carzana’s world, the narcissist was going to look at himself in a redemptive way. “How can we understand our own intentions in contributing to global warming, in contributing to all these things that are wrong?” he said. “It’s how we have to look at ourselves in the mirror, but be honest about our own contribution, and then from there, hopefully we can move forward in unison.”
17 September 2024
“It’s very much sort of journeying through the darkness, passing through the storm, up through the clouds, and onto the top where the light shines.” It was a symbolic journey Paolo Carzana was talking about, a difficult symbolic climb. “I’ve called the collection Melanchronic Mountain,” he said. “Everyone around is feeling a lot in this moment, the way the world is. It’s this feeling I have that it’s so hard to try and be positive, but we can. It’s within the bones that we carry, how we can transform that pain into hope.”There’s something almost primeval and mythic about the emotion this designer stirs up with his clothes. Is it fashion? Fashion that defies fashion? Or fashion that’s gone into a realm beyond fashion? Whatever it is, this young Welsh visionary creates and plant-dyes clothes by hand and speaks of them almost like William Blake—another total world creator who emerged from nothing at a dreadful time for Britain, driving his fury and pain along a medieval-futurist path to an imagined redemption.Carzana’s first character looked as if he’d crawled out of the mud; barefoot and barely surviving. There was an encounter between two figures, one in black, one white—each wearing identical jackets and trousers, raw-edged garments without any visible fastenings and softly folded-over pocket openings. More people followed in layers of semi-sheer leggings and gauzy, trailing shirts; some in tacked-together greenish-brownish clothing suggesting they might be some sort of latter-day wood-sprites, sprung from nature.What you couldn’t tell was how Carzana had made these pieces. It’s an unconventionality of his own that exists in a weird realm between conscious amateurism and extreme skill. Like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen in their earliest days, he’s inventing techniques as he goes. That’s what makes his shows magnetic—the feeling that you’re watching someone forming something, saying something that you haven’t seen or heard before. It’s not that Carzana is derivative of either of his elders; rather that he shares with them a messianic resolve, the need and hunger to cast a spell, to tell a story, with clothes.There was a conceptual passage, in 16 outfits, of scary, almost rock-like people, and then the appearance of a pair of ethereal guardians—angels at their backs. Stuck in the folds of their head-dresses, beautiful constructs by Nasir Mazhar, were a few ranunculus flowers from a good-luck bouquet that Sarah Burton had sent him the day before.
At the moment, Carzana is working in the studio at Sarabande, the arts foundation supported at the bequest of Lee Alexander McQueen. He’s also won a Kering/British Fashion Council scholarship for sustainability, which enabled him to study his MA at CSM. Now, Carzana has BFC NewGen funding to put on shows. As of next month, he’ll also be contending in the semi-final of the2024 LVMH Prize. Many important eyes are already on him. Two of them belong to Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, the artistic director of womenswear at Hermès, who watched his show as the guest of Sarabande director Trino Verkade. Asked afterwards what she thought of Carzana, she expressed her admiration in the hautest of luxury fashion terms: “I think he is a true couturier.”
18 February 2024
“I don’t know where this came from.” Paolo Carzana was searching for words to describe the tender labor of love, loss and resilience he brought to London Fashion Week: 16 fragile constructs he’d hand-made and dyed himself in the last four weeks.As a creator, Carzana is somehow speaking of the sensitivities, vulnerabilities and despair of his young generation, and yet still managing to reclaim hope and beauty from the tatters of a collapsing world. He’d called his collection “My Heart Is a River for You to Bend”—one of the lines he spontaneously scribbles in sketchbooks as he goes along. For the first time, he’d included womenswear—bunchy, sculptural shapes he creates in 3D draping sessions; his kind of freestyle haute couture.Everything he touches—his hand was palpable in every piece—is made from deadstock or recycled fabric and tinted with plant dyes and spices to produce subtle spectrums of pinks and browns. The vast asymmetric picture hat in a dusty weld yellow, as well as the dried-flower headdresses were the work of his collaborator, Nasir Mazhar, who seasonally interprets and enhances the magical aura around his work.Carzana had dedicated the show to the late music producer Sophie, and to a friend of his mother’s who recently passed away. Both people had a big effect on his life, “but I don’t want to explain everything that way,” he said. “I think it’s just the idea of how much, collectively, our hearts have taken in the last couple of years. All the sort of pain and loss that we’ve just had to quickly wash away. But also the feeling that, no matter how hard you’re hit, your heart remains unbroken, but it can be bent. And this pathway is a river bend that can lead to people that support you and save you.”
18 September 2023
You would scarcely guess that the fairy creatures in their beautiful, tattered clothes who manifested at Paolo Carzana’s show had been magicked into being from one room barely large enough to contain a cutting table. The organically hand-dyed color, the delicate layers tenderly knotted and stitched, and the sense of something almost spiritual being expressed created a rare moment of wonder.Carzana had written a poem, hinting at the message behind the collection—just 15 looks—that he’d named “Queer Symphony.” One of his prodigious talents is writing, notes he scribbles and sticks up on his walls as he goes along. Last season, he retrieved a line from a sketchbook he made while at Westminster University: “Imagine we could be the ones to change it all.”This time, his statement began: “I want to be hope for you.” Like many a designer before him—like Vivienne Westwood herself—Carzana has a messianic conviction that his work must make a stand for good against evil. Behind his collection was the idea of converting the religiously enforced seven deadly sins that were drummed into him at church and school into positive values.“It’s mainly related to this idea that everything I was ashamed of as a kid is now my strength, he said. “Up until I was 17, I would literally pray every night to wake up straight, and pray to be normal. And every single day, I was bullied in school, when I didn’t even know who I was.” He wants his symbolism to be received as an exemplar of queer survival into a life of love and kindness. The shadows of angelic forms hovering over two of his boys—pale, wired organza shapes—were summoned up with the help of Nasir Mazhar. The “symphony” he imagined is of all the voices who have struggled and fought: “Queer lives taken from us before their time.”Carzana is Welsh (his surname comes from his second-generation Italian father). Traditional Welsh tapestry appeared here softly tailored into bias-cut coats, suits, and bandanas. Everything he touches must play some part in saving local tradition and protecting nature. During his art school education—Carzana went on to finish his studies at Central Saint Martins MA—he dedicated years to learning how to dye with plants, spices, and food waste. All of the colors (palest pink, shades of brown, yellow, and purple) had been prepared in sinks at the Sarabande Foundation, where he has his studio.
“I wrapped the garments up and then boiled them with meadow sweet, wild carrot, weld, camomile, onion skins, logwood, madder.…” Just listening to him, it begins to sound like lines out ofA Midsummer Night’s Dream.That such romance and rawness can suddenly arise out of almost nothing, except a phenomenal young person’s imagination and drive to express meaning, felt almost like the opening of another chapter in the fairy story of London fashion itself. Somehow the brightest sparks of creativity always fly in the darkest of times in Britain. It was the same when Alexander McQueen started as a BFC New Gen–sponsored designer 30 years ago, in the depths of an economic recession. It feels almost spookily appropriate that Carzana is now working in the Sarabande studios for exceptional emerging designers and artists, which are funded at the bequest of Lee McQueen. Carzana is also a New Gen recipient. History never repeats itself twice in the same way, but there’s hope in that.
19 February 2023
A hush fell at Paolo Carzana’s first London presentation as people stood around, entranced by his hand-made visions of beauty and tenderness. There were delicately-wrought apparitions of angels in diaphanous head dresses—clothes conjured into being out of self-invented textures and the threads of Welsh history—and all this woven into a collection with a clarion-call of a title: “Imagine we could be the ones to change it all.”Small and low-budget as Carzana’s rite of passage into the public domain was, it lived up to the fascination that’s surrounded him since he posted “Another World,” made in lockdown last year—his one-man, zero-budget, upcycled, naturally-dyed collection suffused with the purpose of fighting the many demons that beset his generation. “It’s the idea that there’s an alternative way of doing things, and an alternative world to exist in, against the rise of false, fake curated online reality,” he toldVogueat the time. “I want to show that we, who share the same beliefs, can be the antidote.”So, finally, viewers were able to absorb the first physical materialization of this most analog of youth leaders. As models took turns to make their way onto a set to be photographed, there was the chance to step forward and examine the intimacy of Carzana’s framing of bodies: his tiny shirts cut to tug open on the torso, strips of semi-sheer fabric falling asymmetrically layered and gathered into soft, padded zones; Welsh tapestry blanket-coats with bodices softly tailored into them. “Tender tailoring with strength and fragility,” is how Carzana described it.The Welsh blankets hold a meaning close to his heart as someone with Welsh-Italian heritage. “They’re traditionally given to couples that are marrying. A gift of love.” Heading off a question about whether his work is intended as menswear, he added, “I think it’s for everyone.”The skill of his details has as tangible an imprint of authorship as might a ceramicist or cabinet-maker—he’s evolved his own way of sewing tiny, raw-edged French seams, making hand stitched sheer leggings, and inventing trouser-flies fastened with a device without buttons or zippers. “It comes from the brain, it comes from the heart,” he said.Carzana’s seraphim, one dressed in white, one black, were walking in almost ridiculously fragile chiffon ballet shoes, held together with tiny stitches. Arising from their backs, airy asymmetrical wings hovered on weightless frames.
Almost invisibly, pairs of transparent hands—gloves, but not really—could be seen protectively embracing their shoulders.
23 September 2022