September 21, 2025 |
Model Louis Vaughan-Drake is stroking the sleeve of his Paolo Carzana shirt. “It feels like… cloth,” he says. “It’s dyed using vegetables and fruits. It’s very raw.” The padded waistcoat is coloured in undulating shades of turmeric, worn over that softly crumpled muslin shirt with a pair of finely pleated trousers. It’s a perfect fit, almost like a second skin.
His observation about ‘cloth’ refers to the waistcoat’s organic muslin, bamboo padding, and the onion skins and turmeric used to colour it. In the 21st century, these are not textiles and ingredients we are used to having next to our skin. We are far more likely to be swaddled in polyester and synthetics.
It’s a glorious, breezy day in London and Carzana and his team are in their element. On the 10 Men set, a hessian backdrop decorated with a sweep of chalk, photographer Kasia Wozniak disappears into the dark cloth of her large-format camera. She counts one, two… we hold our breath. It comes together in a short, sparkling, intense moment. A timer is set as she disappears into a makeshift dark room in a corner of the studio and appears three minutes later with the image immortalised.
from left: Joel and Louis V wear PAOLO CARZANA; from left: Joel, Louis V and Max wear jackets, tops and trousers by PAOLO CARZANA, headwear by NASIR MAZHAR FOR PAOLO CARZANA, shoes by LE MONDE BERYL CUSTOMISED BY PAOLO CARZANA
Carzana’s creative process is a little like this too. Intense, with everything happening in the moment. “Without sounding crazy, I feel like I’m taken over in a way, specifically the last three collections. It’s been my way of dealing with atrocities in the world,” he tells me a few weeks before the shoot. “It has been an antidote. I get taken over by my work and it’s weird to have that feeling.” We are sitting in his studio in Smithfield, overlooking the meat market that has operated from this site for centuries and will soon close for good.
Carzana’s last three collections have formed his Trilogy of Hope, beginning with Melanchronic Mountain, shown last year at the British Fashion Council’s NewGen space at the defunct hotel inside Selfridges, which the department store plans to reopen. The second, How to Attract Mosquitos, was shown in the shared garden of Carzana’s East London home. Each collection was produced in short, passionate bursts, the most recent just a month before the show. “Each time I’m trying to explore something new, a new fabrication, new colours,” he says. The 14 looks he made for the third collection, Dragons Unwinged at the Butchers Block, were shown at historic 18th-century pub the Holy Tavern in Clerkenwell. There was a fluidity and artistry in the way he draped and cut each of the pieces and in the spontaneity of the colour, all natural dyes from his plant-based colour palette, many of which were applied with a brush to help create a feeling of expressiveness. “I haven’t stopped,” he says. “I’ve been in show mode since this last one.” His retail orders are still small enough that he does the production himself, but he also makes pieces to sell through his website and for Fantastic Toiles, the extraordinary nomadic retail project started by Nasir Mazhar, which is a lifeline for designers like Carzana. He also made commissions for Lady Gaga’s Coachella show this year and hosted a sale at the Paul Smith’s Foundation residency space in Smithfield, where he is part of the first cohort of designers to be given access to a studio for 18 months.
from left: Louis V wears PAOLO CARZANA, headwear by NASIR MAZHAR FOR PAOLO CARZANA; Louis V wears PAOLO CARZANA, headwear by NASIR MAZHAR FOR PAOLO CARZANA, shoes by LE MONDE BERYL CUSTOMISED BY PAOLO CARZANA
When we meet, Carzana is in the middle of production for an order from Dover Street Market Ginza in Tokyo. While the presentations show a romantic, dreamy vision, distanced from reality, there are also individual pieces that show a certain wizardry and can be worn over and over again. Some of the fabric he’s using is from the ends of rolls he was given when he was at the Sarabande Foundation, a beautiful cashmere wool from McQueen that he will overdye. I ask how he translates his instinctive cutting, draping and painting into production pieces. He says he runs things through the machine as fast as he can to achieve an idea. For example, he made the piece he’s showing me, a jacket, in half a day. “It would have come from some kind of Toulouse-Lautrec drawing. But when you’re making it for production, it’s completely different.” There are guards for pockets, extra stitch lines for durability; it’s a longer, more careful process, though he doesn’t draw. “I look at research and think about silhouettes in my head. I’ll work with research garments where they’ll inspire a pattern, like part of a skirt can become a textile for another piece.” It’s a creative flow he loves. “I enjoy it. I get anxious and aggravated when I’m not in a period of making,” he says. Admin, emails, social media, sponsorship and logistics, all the stuff of running a business, are not his forte. In January he deactivated his personal Instagram, which he says has helped. “When I’m not in the period where I am being creative, I can feel very down. Definitely.”
Carzana, who is 30, was born in Cardiff. His sister is a teacher and he is close to his parents. His mother works for HMRC and his father, who is of Italian heritage, is a builder. He still has family in the village of Macugnaga on Italy’s northern border, where his great-grandfather built a house with his two brothers. He has a poster on his studio door with photographs of the flora and fauna of the village. They go as a family once a year, timed around the show calendar. When he was completing his BA at Westminster, what he describes as a “mammoth” collection, his mum would get on a coach in Cardiff after work on a Wednesday and spend the weekend in London. She helped him make everything, from waxing metres of fabric to blanket-stitching. For the show in his Hackney garden, his parents spent the three weekends before it clearing the space. On the night, it looked immaculate. “They’ve been magically supportive,” he says.
from left: Max wears PAOLO CARZANA, headwear by NASIR MAZHAR FOR PAOLO CARZANA; Louis B wears PAOLO CARZANA, headwear by NASIR MAZHAR FOR PAOLO CARZANA, shoes by LE MONDE BERYL CUSTOMISED BY PAOLO CARZANA
Carzana’s approach in terms of his values is uncompromising, yet seems like common sense. “The ingredients and recipes, the very materials, working with no synthetic chemicals or fibres, [create] clothing that ispositive, and that is the future,” he says. “It’s crazy it’snot the present.”
He compares fashion to food. “If you were to think about luxury food, you would think about organic, not about eating E numbers and God knows what. But it’s not the same with clothing.” He became a vegan on his birthday in 2016 out of concern for animal welfare but he’s become more pragmatic since his BA days, when he wouldn’t use wool or silk. His thinking now is that peace silk, which is produced without killing the silkworm larvae, is a better material than recycled polyester tulle, which is made from fossil fuels.
“It is such a pleasure to use a plain fabric like organic cotton muslin through dyeing, pattern-cutting and all the processes… more exciting than some new, shiny fabric.”
The Hackney show was a response to a challenge he set of “How can it be as meaningful and real as possible?” Hosting it in his back garden was a way of breaking down the facade he’d put up with conventional shows. “Doing the garden show was the idea of coming in and leaving ego at the door because you’re literally coming into my home, where I’m being as vulnerable as I can.” While the guests were arriving, Carzana and his team (stylist Patricia Villirillo and Mazhar) were upstairs in his bedroom putting finishing touches to the 18 Caravaggio-inspired looks. “That story was a reflection of the way the world is going with its newfound narcissism. I knew we could create that pond and Narcissus could wash away his reflection. It became a positive story.”
from left: Max wears PAOLO CARZANA, headwear by NASIR MAZHAR FOR PAOLO CARZANA, shoes by LE MONDE BERYL CUSTOMISED BY PAOLO CARZANA; Joel wears PAOLO CARZANA, headwear by NASIR MAZHAR FOR PAOLO CARZANA, shoes by LE MONDE BERYL CUSTOMISED BY PAOLO CARZANA
Carzana has also gathered loyal support from industry figures, such as Professor Andrew Groves at the Westminster School of Art, Sarah Mower, who chaired the BFC Kering scholarship panel that allowed him to continue his MA studies at CSM, and Mazhar, who was his MA menswear tutor. Mazhar remembers his initial excitement at seeing Carzana’s portfolio crammed with ideas, swatches and drawings. It was perfumed with flowers, herbs and spices he was using as dyes and was, Mazhar says, “a portal into his mind”. Trino Verkade offered Carzana a residency at Sarabande and helped him to develop his business. There, in 2022, he produced his London Fashion Week debut collection, Imagine We Could Be the Ones to Change It All, followed by Queer Symphony for AW23. Four pieces from it were purchased by The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s costume archives for last year’s Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion exhibition. He has the aforementioned backing of Paul Smith’s Foundation this year and Mower sends him a note of encouragement before each show. The fashion critic Cathy Horyn described him brilliantly as “a defiant kink in the fashion system”.
There’s a sense of evolution and continuity with his collections, beginning with The Boy You Stole: The Land We Fill, his graduation collection at Westminster. “That collection was definitely the birth of my clothes becoming a vehicle for my values,” he says. His decision to use natural fibres and plant-based dyes was instinctive, as he wasn’t setting out to produce a sustainable collection. “There’s so much greenwashing and so many insincere missions,” he says. “I want it to be scrutinised in the same way as any other house, even though all the natural dyeing processes, hand-waxing and materiality are the foundation of it and [will last] for ever.”
from left: Louis B wears PAOLO CARZANA; from left: Max and Joel wear PAOLO CARZANA, shoes by LE MONDE BERYL CUSTOMISED BY PAOLO CARZANA
Dominic Osbourne, who manages education and designer initiatives at the BFC, accompanied Carzana to the LVMH Prize in Paris when he was nominated in 2024. Osbourne says Carzana has “his own conviction of doing things his own way, on his own terms”. While it is challenging for a designer to not compromise, he observes that the process and ideas have a real integrity. “You can’t help but feel that emotional pull when you’re seeing one of his shows,” says Osbourne. “He’s always striving for hope and going towards the light. He is trying to transcend something. It’s just very honest.”
Next to Carzana’s desk is a note handwritten in capital letters. It says IMAGINE WE COULD BE THE ONES TO CHANGE IT ALL. It’s the name of his LFW debut collection, but also feels like a mission statement, a constant reminder of his purpose. After the shoot, I message Carzana to say how beautiful the day was. In reply, he says he is “over the moon with the shoot” and it was a “truly special day”. I am struck with the heightened sense of positivity, creativity, warmth, and I would even go so far to say love, which permeated the studio that day. Maybe it was something to do with the brightness of the sun. Or maybe it was something more – a glimmer of hope in the darkness of what’s going on in the world, a sense of something better, something new.
Taken from 10 Men Issue 62 – BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE, TRANSFORMATION – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
PAOLO CARZANA: TENDERNESS
Photographer KASIA WOZNIAK
Creative Director PAOLO CARZANA
Text TAMSIN BLANCHARD
Headwear NASIR MAZHAR
Models LOUIS BAINES at Kate Moss Agency, LOUIS VAUGHAN-DRAKE at Next Management, MAX TATE at Models 1 and JOEL ORTIZ at Present Model Management
Movement director HARRY PRICE
Hair LACHLAN MACKIE using BUMBLE AND BUMBLE
Make-up DAN DELGADO using EMMA LEWISHAM SKINCARE and M.A.C COSMETICS
Set designer EMILIA BOCIANOWSKA
Photographer’s assistant PIOTR JAROSZ
Creative director’s assistant PAOLO IACOBUCCI
Casting NICO CARMANDAYE at Concorde Casting
Production SONYA MAZURYK
Clothing throughout by PAOLO CARZANA, Shoes throughout by LE MONDE BERYL CUSTOMISED BY PAOLO CARZANA
from left: Paolo Carzana uses natural dyes to create his poetic designs; Louis V wears PAOLO CARZANA
