Astria, a hybrid, shape-shifting project, subverts conventions across fashion, politics, and ritual. Curated by Claudio Pagani, it rewrites the body as a site of resistance.
Words Domenico Costantini
In today’s mutable cultural grammar—where fashion often lapses into silent spectacle and design flirts with the merely decorative—Astria emerges as a striking counterpoint: intentional, precise, irreverent. More than a brand, Astria is a curatorial gesture, a form of resistance. It is a project born not to embellish the system, but to dismantle it—delicately, defiantly, piece by piece. An archaeology in reverse, from the future back to the origin.
Founded by curator and thinker Claudio Pagani, Astria operates as an incubator of transformative ideas. It privileges radical transparency and the centrality of unmediated creativity. Each object is designed by a different creative voice, in a process where limitation becomes opportunity. There is no excess, only focus. No urgency, only necessity. It does not aim to fill an empty space but to respond to a void of meaning.
The first object, Astria/001, designed by Alessandro Onori, is a scarf that becomes a bag that becomes an accessory. A hybrid form, unstable and mutable. More than a sustainable object, it embodies an ethic of making: honest, traceable, and vulnerable. A second version in denim—a fabric with a storied past, woven for endurance—speaks to labor, time, and embodied memory. With its functional pockets, raw edges, and exposed stitching, every element gestures toward the hand, the craft, the tactility of everyday life.
Yet Astria’s most radical proposition is not the object itself but the use of design as a language to subvert dominant narratives. The campaign accompanying Astria/001 reimagines the uniform as a site of critique: referencing the stark visual codes of Nazi Germany, the imagery is dismantled and recontextualized through a queer and genderless lens. The result is a liberated body inhabiting systems of power only to turn them inside out, rendering them porous, unstable, and plural.
Here, the reference to Bent—Sean Mathias’s 1997 film adaptation of Martin Sherman’s play—becomes crucial. In one of its most haunting scenes, Mick Jagger, in full drag, performs Streets of Berlin in a cabaret masquerading as sanctuary. His slow, deliberate movements cut through the cold machinery of history. The queer body—made up, adorned, exposed—defies terror through sheer presence, through the fragile power of aesthetics. It is a moment of performative beauty that fractures the norm, a gesture that restores dignity through disguise, song, and dance.
Astria sees itself reflected in that moment. The accessory becomes a ritual garment, fashion a language of refusal, the body a politicized terrain.
The body is where everything is written.
Every fold of the scarf, every seam in the bag, every gesture that wears the object is a possibility for rewriting. In Astria/001, the accessory is no longer decorative—it becomes an affective infrastructure, a topography of identity, a scenographic element, a personal archive.
The decision to preserve a singular aesthetic thread across multiple designers is a statement of trust in collective vision. Coherence, here, is not a matter of style but of semantic space. Following Onori, the second object, Astria/002, will be designed by Belgian designer Robin Deceuninck.
Photography: Valerio Vescio, Andrea Agrati · Additional Photography (Lisa Stein Photo): Matteo Strocchia, Marco Servina · Art Direction: Claudio Pagani, Simona Coltello · Hair: Davide Omizzolo · Styling: Giorgia Di Salvatore · Talent: Etienne Maclaine (Yu Agency), Marcelo Prodel (The Atelier Scouting) · Post Production: Marco Dabbicco · Production: Black Pony Studio · Copywriter: Luigi Morra
