Success hasn’t changed Luchino Magliano’s almost visceral approach to what he does; his voice is becoming even more radical—and political, if you can read between the lines. His fashion still comes from a place of raw discomfort. Pain, insubordination, and anger are distilled into the feel of gaunt detachment his shows convey—the impetus of a (dysfunctional) volcano buried under thin ice.
“Memories hit you without warning like shards or thunderstorms,” he said at a preview. The roar of thunder opened today’s show, a riotous salade of archeological reminiscences “finally intimate, not just personal,” as Magliano put it. He has a way with the emotional nuances of wording, and with supremely blasé, deceptively insouciant dressing. He’s actually a renegade aristo playing working-class hero.
By his own admission, Magliano is lowering his guard, letting family memories in, and being much more explicit and upfront in championing his queer community. “I’ve kept my voice low, like a mutter or a whisper,” he said. “But not anymore. I guess I have matured. Growing as a person and as a company hasn’t been easy at all. But the reason I started all this in the first place was to have a fucking voice. I’d be an idiot if I wasn’t using it.”
In the collection, more stringent and concise than usual without losing its flair for the languidly seditious, traces of Magliano’s political stance were sparsely woven throughout, like crumbs left in the woods to find your way home. String of Google searches on porn, on Emily Dickinson’s poetry and the tragic, bloody police aggressions in 2001 against student demonstrations during the G8 in Genoa were embroidered onto the lapels and the trouser belts of a slouchy, debonair black suit. On a white waistcoat, the image of Pinocchio (“a queer hero”) engaging rather overtly in cruising activities was printed in stark black and white. Sex and the body were definitely on Magliano’s agenda, “they have to be addressed with no shame or judgment, because it’s who we are,” he said. Chemsex and its arsenal of lab tools were transmuted into a hazy, allusive print, inspired by Bolognese artist Giorgio Morandi’s melancholic nature mortes “that spoke about the silence surrounding objects.” Pier Paolo Pasolini “on set while he was filming Medea” was referenced in a look where a lived-in, unassuming shirt was twisted and knotted, worn open and tucked into short shorts. A workwear apron was made into a tight-fitting top in nude latex.
Magliano is about twisting classics into “crazy new functions.” There were plenty of surreal, and rather humorous, twisting and knotting in the collection. Coats were integrated with beach towels; trousers could be rolled up to become swimsuits; the hems of blazers were curled up and intertwined with no apparent reason; the hem of a double-breasted suit’s lapel was knotted into a smaller inflatable balloon. “We give you new opportunities for madness,” said Magliano. “I want to specialize in trans-formative objects.”
Underneath the need to disturb and provoke, there’s a touching naïveté that makes Magliano endearing. The feminine gesture of cross-stitching brought back memories of the little tableaux his mother embroidered when she was a kid. He reprised some cross-stitching motifs on a couple of knitted twin-sets, made in collaboration with designer Jezabelle Cormio. Other fellow creatives—Francesco Risso, Veronica Leoni, Niccolò Pasqualetti, Adrian Appiolaza—rooted for him, cheering from the front row.
