“It’s very much sort of journeying through the darkness, passing through the storm, up through the clouds, and onto the top where the light shines.” It was a symbolic journey Paolo Carzana was talking about, a difficult symbolic climb. “I’ve called the collection Melanchronic Mountain,” he said. “Everyone around is feeling a lot in this moment, the way the world is. It’s this feeling I have that it’s so hard to try and be positive, but we can. It’s within the bones that we carry, how we can transform that pain into hope.”
There’s something almost primeval and mythic about the emotion this designer stirs up with his clothes. Is it fashion? Fashion that defies fashion? Or fashion that’s gone into a realm beyond fashion? Whatever it is, this young Welsh visionary creates and plant-dyes clothes by hand and speaks of them almost like William Blake—another total world creator who emerged from nothing at a dreadful time for Britain, driving his fury and pain along a medieval-futurist path to an imagined redemption.
Carzana’s first character looked as if he’d crawled out of the mud; barefoot and barely surviving. There was an encounter between two figures, one in black, one white—each wearing identical jackets and trousers, raw-edged garments without any visible fastenings and softly folded-over pocket openings. More people followed in layers of semi-sheer leggings and gauzy, trailing shirts; some in tacked-together greenish-brownish clothing suggesting they might be some sort of latter-day wood-sprites, sprung from nature.
What you couldn’t tell was how Carzana had made these pieces. It’s an unconventionality of his own that exists in a weird realm between conscious amateurism and extreme skill. Like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen in their earliest days, he’s inventing techniques as he goes. That’s what makes his shows magnetic—the feeling that you’re watching someone forming something, saying something that you haven’t seen or heard before. It’s not that Carzana is derivative of either of his elders; rather that he shares with them a messianic resolve, the need and hunger to cast a spell, to tell a story, with clothes.
There was a conceptual passage, in 16 outfits, of scary, almost rock-like people, and then the appearance of a pair of ethereal guardians—angels at their backs. Stuck in the folds of their head-dresses, beautiful constructs by Nasir Mazhar, were a few ranunculus flowers from a good-luck bouquet that Sarah Burton had sent him the day before.
At the moment, Carzana is working in the studio at Sarabande, the arts foundation supported at the bequest of Lee Alexander McQueen. He’s also won a Kering/British Fashion Council scholarship for sustainability, which enabled him to study his MA at CSM. Now, Carzana has BFC NewGen funding to put on shows. As of next month, he’ll also be contending in the semi-final of the 2024 LVMH Prize. Many important eyes are already on him. Two of them belong to Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, the artistic director of womenswear at Hermès, who watched his show as the guest of Sarabande director Trino Verkade. Asked afterwards what she thought of Carzana, she expressed her admiration in the hautest of luxury fashion terms: “I think he is a true couturier.”
