FLEWID DIGITAL
Artist, Stylist and Photographer: Francesco Colucci
Writer: Giuppy d’Aura
Retouch and Assistant: Riccardo Bragalini
To reduce fashion to a form of self expression would be inaccurate, if not wrong, and this is made even clearer during this current global crisis in which fashion is suffering, like any other business, and brands are asked to find new ways of selling in order not to succumb under the pressure of an imminent possible recession. Some experts say that only the strong will survive.
What needs to be remembered, however, is that fashion is not new to global crises, and it emerged from all of them even stronger, because it was in these difficult moments that fashion professionals, equipped with exceptional creative skills, could find new ways for conveying their own present, their own zeitgeist.
One of today’s visionaries is Italian born and London based window dresser Francesco Colucci, who recently started using the language of selfies (an untrodden path for him, so he claims), in order to recount creatively his archive of clothes and accessories.
This global pandemic is particularly frustrating for us fashion-lovers, because the very raison d’être of fashion is deeply linked with giving an idea of our own selves to others. We dress in order to be seen, in order to communicate and how frustrating that becomes in a time in which social distancing is a must, and appearing in public is perceived as a sin.
But there we go! Social media, for Colucci, become an open window, pretty much like the shop windows he dresses so well and so creatively, and it is a space to experiment a new language with a great deal of freedom.
He uses his own archive, and since there is no available model he becomes his own model, his own canvas to paint.
This is the message that Francesco shouts out loud. No matter how big the crises, you can save yourself though creativity and using the limitation as a frame that stimulates new visions, rather than a constricting curse.
So, there is a chance that the experts that I quoted above might not be entirely right: not only the strong will survive, but the resilient too, the ones able to read the world in a new way, like Francesco is doing.
