The magical apparitions Paolo Carzana conjured in the Reading Room of the British Library felt like creatures spirited from air and earth, tenderly held together in the face of a world that’s falling apart. In a sense, they’d literally sprung from the library’s shelves: Carzana spent hours there in the summer immersing himself in historical reference books depicting prints and drawings of animals and sea life that humanity has driven to extinction, or is pushing to the brink of it. This was while news of the world’s worst-recorded mass bleaching of coral was being reported.
“Really my focus is on the genius of mother Earth, and the monster of humanity,” Carzana said, after the sight of his myriad colors of hand-dyed fragile, fragmentary clothes had wrung tears from many in the audience. “It’s always been a big conflict to me to use animals as inspiration in terms of fashion, because I’m vegan. So my obsession with this collection was finding a way to honor nature and its preciousness in a way that was really abstract. I try to question what we call supernatural—usually it’s about being on another planet, or somewhere else,” he continued. “But so much of what is on our Earth is super nature—supernatural colors that you can t believe, and the textures of plants and a world of things that were created.”
Carzana has been working at the free studio space the Paul Smith Foundation in Smithfield Market. A week before the show, he was in a room filled with materials he was dyeing and hand-painting, evolving his techniques creating poetic depths of shades within shades—lavender, yellows, greens, blues, saffron, browns. He’s been building his repertoire of plant dyes since he was a BA student at Westminster University. Now his exceptionally knowledgeable and interpretive use of his materials is at the level of a fine artist or musician.
“This time, inspired by the love of the ocean, I was working with seaweed as a creation for color, as well as sea salt,” he explained backstage, gesturing with dye-stained hands. The composition of Carzana’s looks was abetted by Nasir Mazhar, the creator of headwear. His asymmetrical drapes of fabric—abstract shell-like bonnets, scrolls of paper suggesting feathers or tentacles of octopi—breathed yet more organic life into the whole thing. The way it all came together with his collaborators and models, Carzana concluded, “was really, really, really magical this time.” There wasn’t a person who left the library that would disagree.
