Welsh designer Paolo Carzana is still a little new to the industry but has already amassed followers as well as some clout: he is a recipient of the British Fashion Council NewGen award and has BFC support money to put on shows, and is also an artist in residence at the Sarabande Foundation, the arts foundation supported at the bequest of Lee Alexander McQueen.
His vision is fairly singular, much like McQueen. While promoting his Fall Winter '23 collection entitled "Queer Symphony," he said, "It’s mainly related to this idea that everything I was ashamed of as a kid is now my strength. Up until I was 17, I would literally pray every night to wake up straight, and pray to be normal. And every single day, I was bullied in school, when I didn’t even know who I was."
It is a shared story among many of us in the gay community, one I have heard many times...surviving emotional, psychological, and often physical abuse and attacks to emerge on the other side, despite or probably because of it all, with a hunger and drive to create something beautiful, to express a force that could not be taken from us. I can attest to the truth of this from my own personal experience. So I feel great tenderness toward and interest in the creations of Paolo Carzana.
His sartorial vernacular is made of delicate fabrics tied and stitched together that seem like creations from some dream world, as if those wearing his garments should be lounging around on marble terraces in bright Pre-Raphaelite splendor, or in a lush production of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The cuts feel like they are memories of historical clothing, like tattered remnants of a far-away homeland after a shipwreck, and his beautiful sheer, ripped, ruched tops and trousers seem like they belong on wood sprites, elves, fairies. There is a hushed beauty to the silhouettes and construction of the garments that casts a spell. The cherry on the cake of his brand is his earnest commitment to sustainability. He uses deadstock, antique, or recycled fabric, and he uses plant dyes and spices to color his fabrics, including black walnut, Himalayan rhubarb, wild cherry bark, turmeric, tea, orange spice, hibiscus, and apple wood
So for this FW '25-'26 collection at London Fashion Week, entitled "DRAGONS UNWINGED AT THE BUTCHERS BLOCK," he showed his dreamy creations in a small pub called The Holy Tavern that could only hold forty people inside while a dozen more sat on bar stools in light rain on the pavement, and a legion of fans inside an adjacent narrow Victorian passage named St John’s Path. The clothing is sublime but the message is dire. Carzana explained, "I wanted to show where we are today--in purgatory. We live in dark times… Because humanity is destroying our planet. And also the way that LGBT rights are being taken away from us, so we cannot be ourselves." The title itself: dragons who are normally fierce creatures, flying about free, have had their wings removed...and they are on the butcher block, to be mutilated and killed. And how could such an image relate to what is going on in the world...hmmm, think think...
https://www.paolocarzana.com/
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