A new curious project by Antonio Marras tell us culture is alive… and stylish too!
Text by: Annarosa Laureti
In a society like today’s, where information circulate so fast and in bulk, culture seems to have lost appeal. Although its immortality, nowadays it isn’t so fashionable: strengthening it, giving it more value, maybe making it cooler, this is the mission of Zanichelli, the Italian publishing company leader in the culture promotion.
After having attempted a first approach – throughout the awareness campaign to Italian language that has seen the dissemination of eco urban graffiti sketching words to save – now the publisher has winked at fashion world giving birth to an unusual liaison with the designer Antonio Marras.
Initially claimed to design a special dress, and then moved to dress up directly the ultimate Italian vocabulary , the Zingarelli, the designer has shown the result of the project “La cultura va di moda” (culture is fashionable) during a pre-view event in the magic Nonostante Marras concept store in Milan, describing it, with a bit of embarrassment, as “born from fear”.
A fear essentially arisen from the fact it could accost not only a precious object, the dictionary, but also the Italian language itself. Adopting an unconscious and artisan approach, Marras has shaped, engraved, cut and drilled white-covered vocabularies, creating 16 different and unique works, all inspired by a woman.
In particular, from 8th to 21th of November, among a mole of art and fashion books and clothes, in the atelier, it will be on display, throughout the artworks, strong women like Grazia Deledda, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Diane Arbus, Camille Claudel, just to name a few. Chosen because, as women, they are the custodian of human creation. They are also particularly involved with matter of change and, above all, of pain, as the designer told. He portrayed them by using disparate materials that bring him back to his childhood in Sardinia: from gauzes to cactus’ spurs, sheep wool fabric balls and 70s stencils.
Gianluca Gorazi of Zanichelli reminds: “This is a separate project that for the moment doesn’t go beyond itself, since now we are really abuzz”.
Marras’s fashion is a fashion that doesn’t deny to dialogue with other disciplines… “Fashion is a language, a code, a form to comunicate and clothes are words of a dig vocabulary” the designer concludes.
