BAZAAR

Over the years the idea of travel, of the journey to some other place, has freely been explored by Italian ready-to-wear. The creative act is understood as a movement between appropriation and deliberately inaccurate citation. This is expressed in clothing, accessories and jewelry that evoke the atmospheres of an exotic elsewhere that is often just desired, imagined with an approach that favors the pop gesture which accompanies the forms of mass tourism over anthropological rigor.

It is an elsewhere for everyone, absolutely not elitist. In the 1970s Walter Albini short-circuited the East with a style of dress suited for urban guerrilla warfare. In the 1980s and 1990s inspirations from China, Japan, India, Morocco and other parts of North Africa could often be found in the work of Italian stilisti-Gianfranco Ferré, Krizia, Giorgio Armani-who used them to reshape the figure with an attitude that often associated styling with design.

Atmospheres are mixed up shamelessly as in a bazaar, blending high and low in an apparent shifting and garish disorder that simultaneously offers to our gaze the more aggressive animal prints of Roberto Cavalli and Versace and the delicate material research of Romeo Gigli, poised between Indian colorings and Byzantine gleams.