There are people who seem to be born in the perfect time and place, their lives are aligned with a benevolent destiny offering them multiple opportunities and chances. This doesn't happen to the majority of us, though, and fashion designer Gabriele Colangelo is part of that vast majority.
Colangelo is an artisan and a very knowledgeable expert when it comes to textiles, leather and furs (he comes from a family of furriers). Throughout the years he has also mastered a form of architectural minimalism that calls to mind Japanese designers.
Colangelo doesn't seem to fit in this superficial world in which those designers who use bright and vivid colours or visually striking embellishments and come up with the most extravagant confections characterised by exaggerated silhouettes and volumes, have an immediate impact on social media and find immediate fame.
And so it happens that his collections end up being understated affairs, often appreciated only by those who look closely, who dare to touch a material, turning the hem of a dress and finding it is perfectly done, or trying on a pair of trousers and realising that, as if by magic, they fit like a glove.
Yet the designer is not just about artisanal crafts: for his S/S 20 collection, showcased during Milan Fashion Week, he showed for example his interest in technology and the world of crafts moving from the photographic printing process called lumen.
Lumen prints consists in putting a flat object on a piece of sensitive paper and exposing it to the sunlight until it changes colour, leaving the shadowed areas unchanged or less-unchanged.
After placing the print in a bath of print fixer for five minutes, the colour of the print will change again, becoming permanent. Colours vary, depending on the paper, and you may get pinks, browns, beiges and lilacs (as seen in the prints by photographer Heather Siple juxtaposed in this post to Colangelo's designs).
Colangelo's distorted nuances tried to mimick the unpredictable palette of lumen prints, those subtle colour shifts produced by the reactions between an object and paper, so there were soft neutrals broken by pale yellow, peach, pale blue and lilac, with tie-dye prints employed to recreate the effect of the sun on photographic paper.
Textile and textures were the result of a long research into fabrics: laser-cut leather strips were hand-woven and applied on tunics and jackets to create juxtapositions between solid and mesh textures, while a pair of gray silk linen jacquard trousers and a coat had been deconstructed by hand, removing the horizontal threads from the garments to give them an unfinished effect that destabilised their structure.
The light dresses, long-sleeve blouses, fluid trousers and boxy coats with soft modernist shapes were given a tough treatment with the addition of supple leather aprons tied to the front or one-shoulder leather plastrons that gave a genderless touch to the collection.
It hurts being an intellectual in a world ruled by superficiality, but there are plenty of wise women out there looking for this level of complex textures in well-cut clothes made by clever designers who may not be incredibly famous - Colangelo caters for their needs.
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