2022
EMANUELE COCCIA: FASHION HAS BEEN A LABORATORY OF WESTERN MORAL IDENTITIES
Dobrila Denegri: As an intellectual and philosopher, you have explored various topics, beginning with medieval Christian theology, progressing to the philosophy of biology, and more recently, questioning how we might think differently about the material and psychic aspects of the world we inhabit - our home.
Your latest reflections have also turned to fashion and creative figures such as Alessandro Michele, whose work has had an enormous impact on contemporary fashion and aesthetics in general. What drew you to the world of fashion?
Emanuele Coccia: I would start with a biographical fact: I was born into a family that worked in the high fashion industry, but failed in this sector, so I was brought up to despise everything to do with fashion... Any designer’s garment was considered evil!
Then, over time, I became interested in fashion and discovered aspects that really appealed to me, such as the excitement you can feel during a fashion show, for example. For me, it is such a strong emotion that it even surpasses the emotion we can feel when contemplating a work of art. I see these shapes come to life when a body moves; they are like a synthesis of the arts.
A dress is like a home for the body; it envelops it and follows it everywhere. It is something made by someone that we use to say things about ourselves: who we are, how we feel.
For centuries, philosophy has told us that to change ourselves, we need to exercise power over our will, work on our conscience, and develop our spirituality.
Paradoxically, however, fashion shows us that all we need to do is put on some colour to become another person. All we need to do is change the way we appear in public to feel like someone else. Implicitly, fashion tells us that our personality is something purely sensory.
Fashion has been a laboratory of Western moral identities, helping us determine what it means to be a woman, a man, or a rebel, and it has always done so by chiselling away at our exterior.
DD: When did you first become interested in the world of fashion, and how did it happen?
EC: Many years ago in Paris, thanks to mutual friends, I had the opportunity to meet Azzedine Alaïa and Carla Sozzani. Both have been very important role models for me, thanks to their intelligence, freedom and creativity. They both opened the doors to this world for me, introducing me to many designers and artists, and so I started working first with Alaïa, then with Dior and now with Gucci.
All of this led me to study fashion, then to teach it and turn this passion into something more solid.
DD: How was your first meeting with Alaïa?
EC: It was wonderful!
Azzedine was one of the most curious people I have ever met, and although he was born in Tunis, he embodied the Parisian spirit in a profound way. He loved to mix worlds, and in his kitchen, where he welcomed his guests, you could meet models, writers, musicians, philosophers, doctors... and there he created this space for debate without limits, without identity, without gender. An open and very stimulating mental space. For these evenings, he asked a friend to bring four young people he considered interesting. I was about 30 years old at the time and was one of those four, along with Camille Henrot, then an emerging artist and now one of the big names in contemporary art. Thanks to these deep connections and friendships, I immediately felt at home in the world of fashion, which is also why my interests are increasingly gravitating towards it.
DD: Let's talk about Alessandro Michele, with whom you are working on a book that will be released next year, and to whose work you recently dedicated a university course.
What did you talk about with the students at Harvard?
EC: First of all, I wanted a humanities and social sciences faculty like Harvard to recognise the importance of studying fashion.
I believe that today, without fashion, it is impossible to understand art, or even culture in general. In the sense that today's fashion system is not simply a continuation of what was the history of costume at the end of the 19th century. It is what costume became when the historical avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century demanded that art coincide with life.
It is evident that fashion then became a total art form.
From a social point of view, clothing is the most universal artefact we produce and use.
It is as if clothing were a Trojan horse that allows art to be attached to the body, to life... and thus to have the ability to completely redesign life.
DD: Do you see Alessandro Michele as an artist?
EC: Yes, an artist tout court. He has revolutionised the language of fashion in many ways, starting with gender fluidity, which should not be viewed in the same way as past attempts to smooth out gender differences proposed by designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier or Vivienne Westwood, for example.
Alessandro's clothes truly transcend the distinctions between masculine and feminine, even from a sartorial point of view. It is no longer just a matter of putting a skirt on a male body; it is much more than that; it is actual sartorial surgery.
It is also a political will combined with extraordinary erudition and technical skill.
For me, he was also important because he legitimised the idea that to understand fashion, one must use the language of philosophy.
DD: Yes, philosophy, which we also find in the project ‘Ouverture of something that never ended’, the recent and surprising collaboration between Alessandro Michele and Gus Van Sant. This brings us to the theme of fashion films, or the story that fashion tells through moving images. How did you approach your research, and what will the selection you are curating for the Milan Design Film Festival be like?
Are you working on a selection of films made by emerging designers or films that show fashion from a different perspective?
EC: With my selection, I would like to accompany the paths that Bianca Felicori and India Mahdavi are creating.
At the moment, I am watching many films, mainly produced in France and some in the United States.
Since Paris is historically considered the capital of fashion and the cradle of many fashion schools (more than fifteen), I started from there and from the work of young creatives who are trying to express something about fashion beyond the established fashion houses. I see a slow but decisive convergence of fashion and contemporary art in these productions. Several designers conceive their relationship with clothing in the same way that artists conceive their relationship with their work.
The curatorial idea is twofold: on the one hand, to bring out the relationship with clothing in a similar way to that with a work of art. Fashion, therefore, needs a visual medium to establish itself. On the other hand, I want to highlight an increasingly evident aspect in the work of many designers.
Think of Demna Gvasalia, who showed a video of The Simpsons at one of his latest fashion shows. Then there is Maria Grazia Chiuri, who asked Matteo Garrone to make two films, one on Greek mythology and another on tarot cards. The same goes for Alessandro Micheli with Gus Van Sant... so we see that in the post-lockdown period, there is a great rapprochement between fashion and cinema.
All this underlines what fashion is increasingly claiming, namely that fashion is not just about clothes. It requires photography, performance, writing and more.
Since its inception, fashion has been a multimedia art capable of occupying five, six, or seven different media. And now video is becoming a very important means of reflecting on clothing in a psychological, anthropological and socio-cultural sense. In these independent and emerging productions that I am viewing, I am finding many ideas for my own work.
For example, a French-Chinese author has made a video that explains the meaning of dowry. Or another French-American in her video creates a sort of displacement by showing clothes in the most unimaginable places, making us reflect on what fashion is outside the spotlight. That's why my section is called “off-season”, because I want to see what reflection on fashion looks like outside the places where we all look at it.
So, “Fashion Off Season” presents a series of reflections on clothing and the less visible forms of its existence. The choice of visual medium by designers or artists responds to a dual need: to capture clothing in the act of merging with the life of the wearer, or instead to show the series of myths and stories that each garment embodies and tells through an implicit language.
This corner allows us to imagine what clothes would be like if we let them coincide with our dreams.
Halfway between fashion and contemporary art, these videos show both the state of the art of contemporary clothing practices and a utopian projection of the idea of a garment that no longer distinguishes us from the rest of the living, and makes fashion the point of view from which to rethink the planet.
Published in the catalogue of the Milano Design Film Festival.
2022
EMANUELE COCCIA: FASHION HAS BEEN A LABORATORY OF WESTERN MORAL IDENTITIES
Dobrila Denegri: As an intellectual and philosopher, you have explored various topics, beginning with medieval Christian theology, progressing to the philosophy of biology, and more recently, questioning how we might think differently about the material and psychic aspects of the world we inhabit - our home.
Your latest reflections have also turned to fashion and creative figures such as Alessandro Michele, whose work has had an enormous impact on contemporary fashion and aesthetics in general. What drew you to the world of fashion?
Emanuele Coccia: I would start with a biographical fact: I was born into a family that worked in the high fashion industry, but failed in this sector, so I was brought up to despise everything to do with fashion... Any designer’s garment was considered evil!
Then, over time, I became interested in fashion and discovered aspects that really appealed to me, such as the excitement you can feel during a fashion show, for example. For me, it is such a strong emotion that it even surpasses the emotion we can feel when contemplating a work of art. I see these shapes come to life when a body moves; they are like a synthesis of the arts.
A dress is like a home for the body; it envelops it and follows it everywhere. It is something made by someone that we use to say things about ourselves: who we are, how we feel.
For centuries, philosophy has told us that to change ourselves, we need to exercise power over our will, work on our conscience, and develop our spirituality.
Paradoxically, however, fashion shows us that all we need to do is put on some colour to become another person. All we need to do is change the way we appear in public to feel like someone else. Implicitly, fashion tells us that our personality is something purely sensory.
Fashion has been a laboratory of Western moral identities, helping us determine what it means to be a woman, a man, or a rebel, and it has always done so by chiselling away at our exterior.
DD: When did you first become interested in the world of fashion, and how did it happen?
EC: Many years ago in Paris, thanks to mutual friends, I had the opportunity to meet Azzedine Alaïa and Carla Sozzani. Both have been very important role models for me, thanks to their intelligence, freedom and creativity. They both opened the doors to this world for me, introducing me to many designers and artists, and so I started working first with Alaïa, then with Dior and now with Gucci.
All of this led me to study fashion, then to teach it and turn this passion into something more solid.
DD: How was your first meeting with Alaïa?
EC: It was wonderful!
Azzedine was one of the most curious people I have ever met, and although he was born in Tunis, he embodied the Parisian spirit in a profound way. He loved to mix worlds, and in his kitchen, where he welcomed his guests, you could meet models, writers, musicians, philosophers, doctors... and there he created this space for debate without limits, without identity, without gender. An open and very stimulating mental space. For these evenings, he asked a friend to bring four young people he considered interesting. I was about 30 years old at the time and was one of those four, along with Camille Henrot, then an emerging artist and now one of the big names in contemporary art. Thanks to these deep connections and friendships, I immediately felt at home in the world of fashion, which is also why my interests are increasingly gravitating towards it.
DD: Let's talk about Alessandro Michele, with whom you are working on a book that will be released next year, and to whose work you recently dedicated a university course.
What did you talk about with the students at Harvard?
EC: First of all, I wanted a humanities and social sciences faculty like Harvard to recognise the importance of studying fashion.
I believe that today, without fashion, it is impossible to understand art, or even culture in general. In the sense that today's fashion system is not simply a continuation of what was the history of costume at the end of the 19th century. It is what costume became when the historical avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century demanded that art coincide with life.
It is evident that fashion then became a total art form.
From a social point of view, clothing is the most universal artefact we produce and use.
It is as if clothing were a Trojan horse that allows art to be attached to the body, to life... and thus to have the ability to completely redesign life.
DD: Do you see Alessandro Michele as an artist?
EC: Yes, an artist tout court. He has revolutionised the language of fashion in many ways, starting with gender fluidity, which should not be viewed in the same way as past attempts to smooth out gender differences proposed by designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier or Vivienne Westwood, for example.
Alessandro's clothes truly transcend the distinctions between masculine and feminine, even from a sartorial point of view. It is no longer just a matter of putting a skirt on a male body; it is much more than that; it is actual sartorial surgery.
It is also a political will combined with extraordinary erudition and technical skill.
For me, he was also important because he legitimised the idea that to understand fashion, one must use the language of philosophy.
DD: Yes, philosophy, which we also find in the project ‘Ouverture of something that never ended’, the recent and surprising collaboration between Alessandro Michele and Gus Van Sant. This brings us to the theme of fashion films, or the story that fashion tells through moving images. How did you approach your research, and what will the selection you are curating for the Milan Design Film Festival be like?
Are you working on a selection of films made by emerging designers or films that show fashion from a different perspective?
EC: With my selection, I would like to accompany the paths that Bianca Felicori and India Mahdavi are creating.
At the moment, I am watching many films, mainly produced in France and some in the United States.
Since Paris is historically considered the capital of fashion and the cradle of many fashion schools (more than fifteen), I started from there and from the work of young creatives who are trying to express something about fashion beyond the established fashion houses. I see a slow but decisive convergence of fashion and contemporary art in these productions. Several designers conceive their relationship with clothing in the same way that artists conceive their relationship with their work.
The curatorial idea is twofold: on the one hand, to bring out the relationship with clothing in a similar way to that with a work of art. Fashion, therefore, needs a visual medium to establish itself. On the other hand, I want to highlight an increasingly evident aspect in the work of many designers.
Think of Demna Gvasalia, who showed a video of The Simpsons at one of his latest fashion shows. Then there is Maria Grazia Chiuri, who asked Matteo Garrone to make two films, one on Greek mythology and another on tarot cards. The same goes for Alessandro Micheli with Gus Van Sant... so we see that in the post-lockdown period, there is a great rapprochement between fashion and cinema.
All this underlines what fashion is increasingly claiming, namely that fashion is not just about clothes. It requires photography, performance, writing and more.
Since its inception, fashion has been a multimedia art capable of occupying five, six, or seven different media. And now video is becoming a very important means of reflecting on clothing in a psychological, anthropological and socio-cultural sense. In these independent and emerging productions that I am viewing, I am finding many ideas for my own work.
For example, a French-Chinese author has made a video that explains the meaning of dowry. Or another French-American in her video creates a sort of displacement by showing clothes in the most unimaginable places, making us reflect on what fashion is outside the spotlight. That's why my section is called “off-season”, because I want to see what reflection on fashion looks like outside the places where we all look at it.
So, “Fashion Off Season” presents a series of reflections on clothing and the less visible forms of its existence. The choice of visual medium by designers or artists responds to a dual need: to capture clothing in the act of merging with the life of the wearer, or instead to show the series of myths and stories that each garment embodies and tells through an implicit language.
This corner allows us to imagine what clothes would be like if we let them coincide with our dreams.
Halfway between fashion and contemporary art, these videos show both the state of the art of contemporary clothing practices and a utopian projection of the idea of a garment that no longer distinguishes us from the rest of the living, and makes fashion the point of view from which to rethink the planet.
Published in the catalogue of the Milano Design Film Festival.
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