February 25, 2025 |
Although his brand may be young, Paolo Carzana knows how to craft an impactful fashion show. In September, he invited the fash pack into the back garden of his Hackney home, which he shares with housemates, for a poetic outing which played out as a parade of disheveled glamour; his tattered creations all handmade and plant-dyed. For a similarly intimate affair, he held his AW25 show at The Holy Tavern, a tiny pub in Clerkenwell, with 60 guests in attendance, most of them spilling out onto the street.
He started the collection on January 24, having spent the month prior on a digital detox after deleting his Instagram. “[It] allowed my mind a break from what seems to be an evolving platform to spread negativity and tear people apart”, wrote the designer in his show notes, which read like a sprawling stream of consciousness. He called the collection Dragons Unwind At The Butchers Block. “I thought about how dragons are the most beautiful and powerful creatures, and could never be at the mercy of man, but what we are seeing today is mankind’s destruction on our earth. I think about LGBTQ rights worldwide, if we have our wings taken away from us, we cannot be ourselves.” He was also thinking about the looming doom of AI and growing commercial pressures on emerging brands. His designs, which are knotted, draped, and dyed using logwood, turmeric, madder and cochineal, are a sartorial middle finger to mass consumption in all senses. “One hope moving forward is that, we as a generation, change the meaning of the word ‘commercial’, because to me commercial is not making something that goes into landfill and never leaves the planet even though it has been disposed of,” Carzana said. “What it is about is creating and owning a piece or something that would be kept, worn and loved forever, the economic value in that is huge, and much more ‘commercial’ to me. So, that is something I need to do.”
Photography courtesy of Paolo Carzana.
