“I don’t know where this came from.” Paolo Carzana was searching for words to describe the tender labor of love, loss and resilience he brought to London Fashion Week: 16 fragile constructs he’d hand-made and dyed himself in the last four weeks.
As a creator, Carzana is somehow speaking of the sensitivities, vulnerabilities and despair of his young generation, and yet still managing to reclaim hope and beauty from the tatters of a collapsing world. He’d called his collection “My Heart Is a River for You to Bend”—one of the lines he spontaneously scribbles in sketchbooks as he goes along. For the first time, he’d included womenswear—bunchy, sculptural shapes he creates in 3D draping sessions; his kind of freestyle haute couture.
Everything he touches—his hand was palpable in every piece—is made from deadstock or recycled fabric and tinted with plant dyes and spices to produce subtle spectrums of pinks and browns. The vast asymmetric picture hat in a dusty weld yellow, as well as the dried-flower headdresses were the work of his collaborator, Nasir Mazhar, who seasonally interprets and enhances the magical aura around his work.
Carzana had dedicated the show to the late music producer Sophie, and to a friend of his mother’s who recently passed away. Both people had a big effect on his life, “but I don’t want to explain everything that way,” he said. “I think it’s just the idea of how much, collectively, our hearts have taken in the last couple of years. All the sort of pain and loss that we’ve just had to quickly wash away. But also the feeling that, no matter how hard you’re hit, your heart remains unbroken, but it can be bent. And this pathway is a river bend that can lead to people that support you and save you.”
