In all of London Fashion Week, the tiniest, almost-off-grid, lowest-budget, handmade happening that Paolo Carzana held in his back garden will surely be chalked up as one of those magically significant moments that people talk about for years.
This was in Carzana’s rented, shared flat in a terraced suburban house in East London—a very far cry from Kensington, where the official LFW wrap party was about to take place on glamorous roof gardens. Martine Rose has been famous, and loved, for taking large international audiences off to experience London neighborhoods, of course. But Carzana went even beyond that: just 70 guests packed on benches around the backyard that his parents had spent August clearing. He’d turned his and his boyfriend’s bedroom into the prep room, persuaded the landlord it would be okay, and asked the neighbors if they’d help with lighting from their windows. Down the road, the local pub got involved by hosting the hair and makeup team.
He didn’t do it to be snobby or exclusive, he said, but because “I feel so out of place with all this idea of coolness. I just care about the clothes and the making and the creation of it. It’s also an attempt, I guess, to try to make everyone understand how special these moments are for us in fashion. To completely remove the smoke and mirrors and show, and make your own miracles.”
Just after dusk, a poignant succession of people in fragile, knotted, plant-dyed tatters walked slowly through his back door. The first, a lad wearing a bunched-up shirt, gray trousers, and a draped medieval-seeming cap, walked down the garden steps, knelt in front of a pond, and paused to gaze at his reflection.
He was striking the classical pose of Narcissus, of course. Carzana had seen Caravaggio’s painting of the boy who fell in love with the sight of himself in a pond. But the opening of this ethereal drama was different from the original legend because, while making clothes that you’ve never seen before, Carzana is also a writer of his own mythologies and a spinner of hope in precarious, frightening times.
It was his metaphor for the source of today’s dystopian reality: “This is reflective of the hell that we’re living in. This complete move to that old, old sentiment of humanity, of vanity, of caring about what you look like, and not caring about the world around you. There are so many really awful wars and hunger, and endless, endless reasons to give up, really. It’s so hard to keep optimistic.” So, in Carzana’s world, the narcissist was going to look at himself in a redemptive way. “How can we understand our own intentions in contributing to global warming, in contributing to all these things that are wrong?” he said. “It’s how we have to look at ourselves in the mirror, but be honest about our own contribution, and then from there, hopefully we can move forward in unison.”
The miracle enlightenment of the narcissist lasted a few seconds before he tore himself away, was bathed in light, and then led out the procession of Carzana people. “Instead of falling in love with himself, he falls in love with helping others and then lights the way for everyone to follow,” said the designer. Well, you didn’t have to know any of that to feel the tender beauty, the gauzy layering, and the buttonless, zip-free poetry of Carzana’s work. Or the way Nasir Mazhar makes the headgear that interprets and extends the emotion of it.
Horrified by waste and climate change, Carzana’s do-no-damage ethic has had him recycling fabric and using plant-dye recipes since he was an 18-year-old student. The dusty pinks, blues, greens, yellows, golds, and browns have all been cooked up from his recipes at the Paul Smith Foundation, where he now has a pro bono studio, and before that at Sarabande, Alexander McQueen’s legacy foundation, and before that at Central Saint Martins and Westminster University.
The thing about Carzana is the gentle but almost messianic way he draws people around him. He stands for and practices the resilience and resourcefulness of a near poverty-stricken generation. He’s the sort of working-class creative firebrand who always rises in London fashion in the darkest of times. He puts older people in mind of a young Lee McQueen, not because of what he makes or how he speaks, but because of that drive to do it and show it anyway. That so many elders and professionals as well as friends, interns, charitable foundations, and the BFC’s NewGen scheme have pitched in to help him speaks volumes.
There will be eye rolls from the industry who will query how someone like this can ever “scale” their production to sell in the “normal” way. The answer, for Carzana’s independent generation, is that for them, the “normal” wholesale and large e-commerce systems (and getting paid by them) are in a nonviable state of collapse anyway.
It’s wise to be aware that, on the outside of this system, a future in fashion is being created by young people with their own grown way of designing, making and selling to make a way of life. Clocked the name Nasir Mazhar? His peripatetic Fantastic Toiles market, now five years old, cuts out all the middle monsters so that Paolo Carzana and many others can be sure to take home cash on the day. This is very small, but it’s saying something big. That’s why so many grown, hard-boiled professionals left with tears in their eyes.
