Dear lost children of fashion, you who live in the age of excess, I, the sublime Alessandro Michele, am going to spit out a few truths in red 99. Because someone has to shout while everyone else is bawling. Alessandro, that aesthete with the fingers of a fairy and a baroque heart, wanted to whisper to us a pause. A little break from the din, a breath in the circus of images, words and trends swallowed up and then thrown away in the moment like a lukewarm milkshake on a terrace.
And it’s precisely on her terrace that we still come across the Bimbos, silicone sculptures in vintage Valentino, sipping two scoops of ice cream with industrial sensuality, as if each lick were an existential manifesto or an advertising campaign for a five-a-seven.
Meanwhile, Mamie Gabrielle, in a Valentinochanel suit and fluorescent trainers, crosses the square on a folding bike, her eyes glazed over, her mind on the run, a cane in the basket, a golden-filtered fag in her mouth. She pedals, the darling of the future, as if she still believed in it. What would fashion be without its double meanings, its fishnet stockings and its chrome bicycles creaking under the weight of our stylish absurdity?
But here is Michele, in the midst of the permanent carnival, offering us a gentle elegy, a tribute to the insignificant. He speaks to us of the infinitesimal, of rituals, of tiny gestures. He wants us to really just look at scrolling, not just liking. He wants us to take the time to contemplate a seam, a wrinkled hand, a bimbo who melts like a soft toffee while enjoying her double-decker cone. Because there’s beauty there too, tenderness even, if you take the trouble to look differently and pay the price, of course.
So yes, in this violent uproar, in this dance of pixels and fluorescent slogans, if Michele wants to make us slow down, make us feel the silk of a sewing gesture with the slowness of a sigh from small hands, let him do it. Let him shout it into the wind, while Mamie Wintour overtakes the scooters, the ice cream melts, the pedals squeak and the world goes mad. Because deep down, perhaps it’s in these absurd and magnificent details that the ineffable and exhilarating memory of the past is hidden.