January 6, 2023 |
“We are a concept,” says Simone Ferraro, founder and creative director of Italian brand A Better Mistake (ABM). It’s a dreary November afternoon when we chat, with Ferraro managing to find only a moment away amid his booked and busy schedule. An autodidact designer also known as Madame_inc, he speaks fervently about his Milanese label, which he founded in 2019 alongside Marco Agnolin, the former CEO of both Bershka and Diesel. “The whole project comes from a pure consideration of creativity, divided in different phases,” he says. “One very beautiful phase is in the beginning, when you’re completely inside of your thoughts and you’re putting so much faith into a concept that the possibility of it being a mistake never crosses your mind – it’s not even on your radar.” As we chat, the designer’s lime green fingernails flash before me; his tatted’ knuckles that read “RIDE” and “HATE” oscillate across the screen as he sits in his blue-sky studio. He’s a counter-cultural designer and with ABM, he is intent on obliterating boundaries and redesigning the fashion realm one rave-ready, cyborg style at a time.
It’s a label that won’t be pigeonholed – A Better Mistake ceaselessly challenges the clichés of the fashion world and stands up against stereotypes with a disobedient, irreverent and provocative tone of voice. While collaboration is key, circularity and environmental consciousness are central and uninhibited creativity is the label’s lifeline. “I think the world would be a better place, if creativity were more important in our culture,” Ferraro says. “It’s all about starting from a blank page, so there are no rules. You just use your imagination to create what you want, and the only way to do that right now is to be disruptive – to break down bridges and go against everything that’s already established.” With disruption in its DNA, Ferraro keeps ABM in constant flux. “Disruption is a way to tell people that we live in a moment where we have a kind of fake freedom: we think we’re doing what we want but everything is set up and has to be done a certain way,” he says.
Ferraro favours a subversive, future-tech sort of aesthetic. With climate conscious wear-how-you-want pieces littered with techy finishes and glitchy Y2K computer graphics, Berghain-ready deadstock dresses and skewed cyberpunk style knits, ABM creates post-reality, gender fluid garments and accessories. “It’s better to call it consciousness, because sustainability and fashion in the same sentence is hard to understand,” he says. Whatever you call it, ABM’s threads are appreciative of the planet.
The designer finds inspiration in, “literally anything that catches [his] attention or that [he] thinks is important to talk about”. Be it his environment, the discourse that cascades around him or his own collaborative dissidents: “it’s a very spontaneous and completely organic process”. For example, his SS23 collection, Eternal, was inspired by the digitised ethereum and uncanny works of New York artist Running Files, who was responsible for the prints that gave the collection its name and set Ferraro into action.
A Better Mistake began as a personal project, quickly burgeoning into a charged anti-fashion brand. “I wanted to do something that would have a strong impact outside of fashion.” Bringing the brand to life in the quiet chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ferraro launched the label in February 2020 and didn’t even meet his team for five months following the launch date. This prompted him to explore the intersections of digital and physical worlds in a bid to define the value of the digital as a whole. “Everything nowadays is happening over Zoom or Google Meets. Society is changing its behaviour, so maybe we should reconsider what can be considered real or not. Like what even is a real experience? Does it need to be physical? Or does just the fact that you experienced it make it real?” he ponders. Whatever the case, ABM deforms and transforms that reality.
Building a community of like-minded collaborators as it grows, ABM bids to coordinate creative minds, to “create new energies, new languages” – people who can add and subtract from an abstract idea, shaping Ferraro’s projects into something palpable. Calling these Gen Z collaborators and millennial professionals his “Team of Mistakers”, Ferraro explains, “Whenever you spend time – even just smoking a cigarette – with someone new, something amazing happens”. Fresh ideas flow, new dialogues are opened and old ones consolidated.
With a formidable focus on giving young people a voice and the tools needed to grow their individual skill sets and careers, his entire internal team is under the age of 26. “I believe so much in young people,” he says. “I think they’re the present and the future of our society and world, so I embrace that responsibility and give them the tools they need to push boundaries, inspiring a new generation of creators.”
By dismantling beauty standards, the binary and the norm, Ferraro’s A Better Mistake is setting the scene for a different tomorrow – a better, alternative reality. “We are in a beautiful time, even though so many ugly and difficult things are happening,” he says. “The status quo is shifting.”
Photography courtesy of A Better Mistake.
