SELF-PORTRAITS
Sixteen SELF-PORTRAITS by the young designers of the ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS in Rome will be on show for ALTAROMA2021, as part of Rome Fashion Week.
Sixteen “SELF-PORTRAITS” with different personalities, all united by the desire to communicate their point of view on the expressive power of clothing. These are the young designers in the final year of the three-year course and the two-year specialisation course of the Fashion Design course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, directed by Cecilia Casorati, who will present their work on Wednesday 7 July at 4:30 pm, on the occasion of the summer edition of Altaroma, as part of the prestigious Rome Fashion Week 2021. Online on the Altaroma platform at the following link: digitalrunway.altaroma.it
Under the guidance of Professor Sara Chiarugi, and with the collaboration of all the course lecturers, the young designers of the Academy will present their creations, sharing their vision and interpretation of fashion with the public and the press, recounting what is happening in the contemporary world, in a carousel of images, emotions and feelings, in a balance between reality and dream.
With this collection, the students – explains Professor Chiarugi – With this collection, the students show us a cultured fashion, socially engaged with sensitive issues, aware of the environmental impact and of how to address new sustainability issues. A fashion that offers an open and casual view of gender fluidity without rhetoric, but with pragmatism and innovation. A fashion attentive to haute couture, which draws on the ancient techniques of embroidery and crochet.
Behind each creation there are different stories and research and artistic paths, original projects and techniques staged to allow each person to highlight their own style and identity. The moods are varied and rich in meaning and value, with messages and visions that make you dream, and sometimes reflect, on the social condition, on art and on the influences that constantly mix and merge to become contemporary trends. Colour, shapes and light, transparencies and volumes, and also textures and textile manipulations that narrate and accompany the viewer towards the exploration of new dimensions, are permeable to the different atmospheres.
Oriental influences blend with European style, equally rich in tradition, through the artisanal construction of fabrics, ancient yarn techniques, sometimes crocheted, that evoke distant worlds. The rigour of military uniforms gives way to transparency and lightness, keeping the image and essence of femininity alive. The poems and texts of distant Persia accompany a young woman on her life journey. Maritime influences recall the importance of play in a childhood made up of colours and carefreeness. Games and doll’s clothes, old trousseaux and photographs found in an attic bring us back to the simplicity of certain bygone times. While one warrior woman has modified her physicality to survive, another embraces her essence, which has been harassed and mistreated for years. A song from Eastern Europe, that of a woman in constant struggle who reveals herself, layer by layer, disclosing her character, and again, a contemporary image of figures free from gender labels who follow a path, a journey, bringing with them the convenience of large pockets and large bags, to be filled with experiences.
Participation in Altaroma – says Director Casorati – – highlights a particular vocation for research that has always characterised the educational paths of our Academy. Research is the place where beauty and knowledge come together, as demonstrated by the creations of our young designers. One of the oldest academies in Italy, taken as a model from the beginning of the 17th century for the numerous similar institutions that would later be established in Italy and throughout Europe, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma is today one of the most important Italian public institutions and is part of the Alta Formazione Artistica e Musicale (AFAM), a system of the Ministry of University and Research.
SELF-PORTRAITS
Azam Gholami – Passaggio (Transition)
It is difficult to maintain a bearable balance between the deepest and most important characteristics of human existence. Birth and death, inner impulses and the forcibly social everyday life. How can an existential reminder be noted? What forms should be given to these passages? What material consistency? What colours should be given to the joy of a mother’s embrace or to the pain of a world full of contrasts?
Elisa Brunetto – Inside the soul
Extreme volumes, embellished with flounces and lace, are in contrast to monastic lines with sashiko embroidery, which hide the body, allude to dissimulation, to a false identity, often an attempt at self-defence. But in an inner dualism that oscillates between black and white, purity, innocence and pretence are contrasted with inner darkness, to preserve the essence of our soul.
Lucrezia Matola – Int.Essere
Combining and integrating different elements to create relationships and new textile materials that are evanescent, fluctuating but also structured. Then there is the colour, evocative of the vastness of the sky with its luminous stars and the impalpability of the clouds… Of the sea, with its mysterious depths inhabited by the powerful movements of the waves. This is what ethereal but earthly women wear, revealing imaginary worlds.
Chiara della Rocchetta – Infans
Infans draws inspiration from Love by Alexander Milov, a sculpture that evokes the child in each of us. Hidden in every human being, often oppressed, forgotten and sometimes wounded, it asks to be brought back to light to nourish us with its simplicity and purity. This is the quest, this is the secret from which these fragile, ethereal, childlike women come.
Aurora De Silli – Rurale
Heavy layers of fabrics that conceal stories and souls; transcultural dimensions in which forms from traditions of distant worlds – Japan, Korea, Russia – merge, clashing with the need for the essential. Born of the people for the people; functional work clothes, designed not to appear but to be. Rurale has deceived time and does not know the concept of space.
Maria Chiara Totti – Illustration comes to life
If an illustration, a drawing, a figure begins to live its own life, it can happen that, perhaps transformed into embroidery, it rises, slips, merges with materials and substrates for which it did not know it was destined. And the garment becomes a backdrop, a pretext for a very serious playful illusion, for the expectation of a second act, of a new movement, of a new page in history.
Tian Dai – Sweet Soldier
Don’t think that young people have erased the past. It is impossible to ignore it: wars are and have been everywhere and always. Military fabrics, heavy cottons, wools and authentic period elements (cartridge belts, helmets) are combined with velvets and airy organzas reminiscent of the eighteenth century to soften a refined sartorial severity with their softness.
Sara Ali – Meraki
Meraki, a Greek word meaning to do something with passion, with total love and a pure soul. Leaving a small piece of oneself in one’s creation, recounting the fairytale aspect of life through embroidery and the magical world of colours. This is the dimension that must be experienced, that can make you happy, that can communicate the beauty of the individual, making every action more sincere.
Alessia D’Ortona – Multipla
It is not a child that you see, but a being on a journey who has been trying to fight, since childhood, with the dangerous creatures of her imagination and with real and imaginary threats from the outside world. She is therefore a multiple personality, a sort of shared dwelling in which – due to a dissociative personality disorder – people who do not know each other and who have different stories coexist.
Tamara Kavrakova – La danza dei colori
Not only the body, not only the soul, but fabrics too can dance. The lightness of silks yearns to imitate nature, reinterpreted in the concreteness of a dress. From it, and from the inexhaustible kaleidoscope of our most positive feelings, springs the power of the colours that flood the catwalk, counterbalanced only by footwear and gloves made from precious oriental rugs.
Giorgia Cianfanelli – Destination Unknown
Expressing a new and necessary way of thinking to face the future, addressing a community of curious, genderless people, the project explores the different from the self. The street, travel, sport, subcultures and workwear are the visuals around which the identity of these useful and multifunctional garments revolves. Often oversized, they are characterised by an explicit and very precise sartorial tradition.
Isabella Zanoni – My Babushka’s Attic
My Babushka’s Attic is a story steeped in memories made up of images, letters, notebooks, diary entries and old photos of people. It is a domestic and melancholic narrative constructed with unfinished patches of fabric found in the attic, deliberately imperfect, which could fray just as a memory might disappear. No buttons or zips should hinder the adaptability of the creations.
Francesca Albertini – The Wire
An inexhaustible catalogue of hard geometric shapes that characterise our surrounding environment meets the human body. In a continuous bounce of contacts and contrasts, derived from the movement of the muscles, the fabric with its cuts, its seams, its different lengths and assemblies, attempts to imitate it with black zigzags that look to a time gone by.
Tao Yexin – Tartan mix Kimono
The geometric simplicity of the kimono allows attention to be focused on its opulent, rare and precious fabric and on its surface embellished with drawings, embroidery, paintings and even verses in splendid calligraphy. But it is the influence of Scottish tartan that places this collection in a new social perspective, an expression of changing times, a fusion of East and West.
Ester Mengoli – Candy Athleisure
Candy Athleisure pursues the convenience of sportswear, freedom of movement and comfort for everyone. It does not view simplicity and deconstruction as elements of weakness but as a hymn to freedom of action. It is not satisfied with technical fabrics but conceals their versatility with embroidery, elaborate workmanship, assembled accessories and decorations that are not superfluous.
Xiaochen Peng – Bullying
A serious social problem, bullying is still a phenomenon that is too often underestimated, the true extent of which is unknown, as is its impact on the younger generation. This collection shouts “stop bullying”, immersing itself with its masks in the victims’ point of view, analysing their physical and psychological state. Not surrendering to pain but opening up to the hope of a new solidarity.
Academy of Fine Arts in Rome
President Alberta Campitelli
Director Cecilia Casorati
Educational coordination: Edelweiss Molina, Alberto Moretti, Graziella Pera, Irene Cerrati, Lucia Masina
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