Logo designed by Anastasia Chernyavska
The highlight of the event was the show put on the last evening, as a grand finale, by Accademia Koefia, a renowned institution which trains its students in the art of couture, passing on age-old techniques to newer generations of designers. Koefia graduates join well-established couture fashion houses, from Dolce&Gabbana to Valentino and Balenciaga, and have done so for decades; their unique skills are much sought after, and they are trained to think about what they are making. They are not merely dressmakers, of whom there is an abundance; they are true designers. Koefia closed AltaRoma 2019 with a magnificent show, sleek, professional and carefully conceptualised.
Their project this year was an attempt to marry 'Made in Italy' with 'Made in Indonesia', highlighting the connection and synergy between two approaches to fashion and dress which are rooted in artisanal traditions, yet carefully avoiding cultural appropriation, the bane of much contemporary fashion in the Western world (think of the recent controversy concerning Kim Kardashian, Carolina Herrera and now Louis Vuitton). Koefia has an ongoing relationship with Indonesian fashion designers and Indonesian textile makers, facilitated by the Indonesian embassy in Rome. Bianca Cimiotta Lami, on behalf of Koefia, has worked on building up this relationship through regular visits to Indonesia since 2013, regularly participating in Indonesia Fashion Week and selecting young Indonesian designers who would benefit from training at Koefia, to broaden their skills. The Koefia short term scholarships are now a feature of Indonesia Fashion Week and are linked to the annual Young Designer competition.
This year Koefia's international graduates presented around 50 pieces. They worked with Indonesian textiles such as batik and tenun, sourced in Indonesia with the help of the embassy, and were inspired by clothing memorabilia of the 1980s. They took on the role of 'curators', referencing the performance by Tilda Swinton in The Impossible Wardrobe, held at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2012. In that show, Swinton, dressed as a museum curator in a white overall (but in heels) would 'reanimate' the clothes in the collection of the Musée Galliera, which would thus come to life through Swinton's dynamic and imaginative interaction with them.
The show by Koefia was a dive in our collective cultural memory, citing 1980s subcultures. It was also an acknowledgement of the cross-cultural nature of much fashion design, but as I said earlier, carefully eschewing appropriation.
My own involvement with Indonesian fashion is no secret, I have just completed a book to be published in the autumn by Bloomsbury, which discusses Indonesian fashion in a global context. I actually met Bianca Lami in Jakarta and was really keen to see her project come to fruition, I went to Rome especially. I was not disappointed.
As for the other shows of AltaRoma 2019 - I successfully obtained accreditation as 'blogger' to view as many as I could - they were interesting, though predictably, a mixed bag. Unlike the Koefia show, there was an overall lack of serious conceptualisation, resulting in a uniform blandness. What has now become an abundance of keywords in fashion, such as 'sustainability', was bandied around with great nonchalance. The workmanship was definitely there, especially in the fashioning of accessories - Italians always make good shoes and bags; however, the ability to present a coherent design project was often a hit and miss affair, not sufficiently thought through.
I did not attend all the shows; thus, my observations are based solely on what I saw - I would love to be challenged on this! Nor did I attend the exclusive, by invitation only, Fendi show which took place at the Temple of Venus, with the Colosseum as backdrop, on July 5th.
One of the shows I saw, part of Rome is my runway 2, struck me as being a possible commentary on the pollution and dirt of Roman streets, where garbage is not collected often enough and, with the summer heat, it rots, giving out a nauseating stench. I am pretty sure this was my own reading of it, I doubt it the designer conceived it to be so. His (male) models wore masks, but possibly this was meant as something decorative. I sent a short video of the collection to a friend, and we laughed - what else can you do? - about the state of Roman garbage collection.
Blowing the cover off fashion and tv. StyleLikeU.
As a Grey model and a fashion activist, involved in campaigning for inclusion - I am delighted to announce that I will soon be working with StyleLikeU, the US-based platform "for role models who stand outside of norms" - I have a particular bone to pick with the organisers of AltaRoma. I was struck by the total lack of inclusion and diversity in the model selection. It seemed to me that the designers (and I am not talking of students, some of them are already established, though perhaps not as world-famous as, say, Dolce and Gabbana or Fendi, the latter a patron of AltaRoma) were operating in a vacuum, disregarding and showing a lack of awareness of the body positivity movement and the changes this has engendered. Even when they positioned themselves, in their press releases, as focussing on the core value of diversity, on feminist attitudes, on the fluidity of gender, this was not seen on the runway. Where were the curvy models, the trans-models, the older models, the disabled models? Even in terms of ethnicity, apart from a couple of young models of colour, the runway was dominated by young, thin, tall Caucasian girls and equally homogeneous looking young Caucasian men. I am here discounting Koefia's models who were students of its modelling and deportment course - students tend to be young. But what about the others?
A show part of AltaRoma 2019 which presented fashion looks and models, a regular feature of all AltaRoma editions
Diversity is not to be confined to a few well-selected words in a press release. Inclusive representation is crucial, and unfortunately, I saw little of it. The clothes themselves are insufficient as a commentary on diversity. They are worn by bodies and it is through the bodies of the wearers that diversity is represented.
I found this lack of diversity on the catwalk rather shocking and somewhat behind the times.
Designers might be able to excuse themselves by saying that they do not select the models, hired directly by the organisers; they can only choose from a pool of girls and boys. It is something I hear all the time in London, where, come Fashion Week, a few designers begin to phone up agencies, even a day before the show, in a panic, realising that the LFW models are not diverse enough. They absolutely need to have at least one older model, one curvy model and ideally, a disabled one and a couple of black models, because a lack of inclusive representation will be noticed. London Fashion Week has come a long way, yet it remains tokenistic. Rome Fashion Week is not even that!
I would invite AltaRoma organisers to view Timeless Beauty, the highly acclaimed documentary film made in 2018 by Deyan Parouchev, a Franco-Chinese coproduction focused on an exploration of atypical beauty in fashion and advertising. It might help to put things in perspective.
Who knows, AltaRoma 2020 might surprise us, in more than one way.
See the article of 11th July in The Jakarta Post by Josa Lukman for a more detailed account of the Koefia show.
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