"A story told in a dream
About the boy who was taken,
Covered by the purest threads.
A tale about the Boy and the Fairy Prince."
This project was the end of a long and complicated journey, and the beginning of a never ending story that I bound myself to tell.
I graduated from fashion school six years ago, and by the end of my third year, when I was supposed to design and produce my final collection, I was completed disenchanted by where I was and what I was doing. My mental health struggles didn’t allow me to follow the course as I wanted, and the whole fashion environment was making me doubt my career of choice.
So I asked myself: “How can I finally end this, without throwing away all the time and money spent for this course?”
And I found two guiding principles that I used during this process, and that I wanted to manifest into the world through my work:
Slow Fashion -
“A movement that seeks to slow down the current fast paced routine of the fashion industry. That seeks to promote craftsmanship, respect for the people and the environment, and artistic and self expression over trends and over-consumption.”
I started with fashion school after a year of studying Art History in Florence.
I had a passion for costume and fabrics, and felt the need to do something more practical than just the study of the history of art. But I must confess that I didn’t know anything about fashion and how the industry actually works.
I threw myself into a place of over-production, marketing-induced mental health issues, harmful standards and stereotypes and a complete disregard for the impact we have in the environment. So I wanted my work to be the opposite of that.
What is slow fashion to me?:
It’s passing the thread through the needle with patience.
It’s hand-stitching calmly and carefully,
It’s to feel and manipulate the fabric, the textures
and remind yourself from where those fibers came
It’s loving the creative process made manifest
by your own hands or by others,
and find community in the knowledge
everything you own and make,
in one way or another,
needed to pass through the hands of hundreds of people,
from the simple natural elements of the Great Mother,
to the thread and fabric you stitch
to bless your body.
And at the risk of sounding pretentious, this quote from Darwin (that also inspired an album of my favorite band), even though he was talking about evolution and a completely different subject, to me it summarizes the creative power of transformation we have in our hands:
“from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
As I said, it may sound pretentious to relate this quote to just “making clothes”, as nowadays craftsmanship is not valued, and fashion as whole is considered to be vein and non-important by the majority of people.
But it’s part of our history and our development in the world, as we are a species of ‘crafters’. It’s part of our cultural heritage, on how we study the past and also it’s how many communities still pass their tradition to the generation to come. It’s also an act of resistance against the mindless production and consumption present in our culture since the industrial revolution.
Crafting is a powerful thing, and I like to highlight the grandeur of it.
A walk into Faerie-
I needed a source of inspiration that wasn’t a reflection of the “trend’s forecasting” mentality that was pushed during the lessons.
Maybe it’s not the best ‘business plan’ to focus most of my art on spirituality, since it was my career of choice, and faith and religion are touchy subjects to a lot of people. But I couldn’t do something that is not ‘me’, as narcissistic as it may sound…
During the time of my graduation I wasn’t initiated and ordained as Priest yet, but Spirituality always had a considerate space in my life. I was used to write poetry and do other forms of creative media to put out my experiences with meditation and trance work.
An attempt to manifest glimpses of the other side through my work.
This process of making art based on spiritual experiences is actually quite common among other Witches, regardless of initiations and different traditions.
We are a community of artists, writers, performers and seekers of Beauty.
So if I wanted to escape the industry’s mentality, it was only natural to look for what was already a big part of my life.
Most of the process came from meditation, prayer and offerings in the altar of the Gods, but also by looking into the work of other artists, who even though might not have a spiritual element to it, were inspired by the same folklore and legends that are the basis of Neo-paganism today.
I remember that Loreena McKennitt’s interpretation of ‘Stolen Child’ by W.B Yeats, and the work of Brian Froud, with his illustrations and oracles of the world of faerie were very influential to me.
“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”
And so, that’s how my graduation collection came to be.
A collection Inspired by the imperfection and asymmetry of nature, using linen as the most important element and handcrafted modifications, creating textures and shapes through the fabrics.
I look at them now, and can see a lot of imperfections and techniques that were not well executed.
But I also see the progress I made during my 3 years of study, what I can do now after 6 years of graduation, and all the journey I need to continue, to learn and practice things that are not yet part of my skills.
It’s an old collection, and I didn’t produce that much during this time (especially during the pandemic). But that collection set the tone for all of my creative work, and sometimes I still use the old patterns for new creations.
And that is the whole point of being Slow…
