There is something deeply unsettling about The Attico Fall 2020 lookbook – and I love it.
The Attico is an Italian luxury brand founded by Gilda Ambrosio and Giorgia Tordini in 2016, known for their quirky-glam partywear. It hadn’t been much on my radar before now, to be honest, lost among the shadows cast by Italian giants like Versace and Prada. But something about The Attico Fall 2020 collection caught my eye, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since it dropped on August 28th.
Back in February, Ambrosio and Tordini declared independence from the rigidity of the traditional fashion week schedule. They’d skip out on Milan Fashion Week and produce collections in their own, more organic, timeline. Of course, the pandemic threw any freshly-sought natural cadence of the creative pipeline out of alignment, delaying their Fall collection by two months. Given that some designers have completely opted out of production during confinement – for understandable reasons – churning out any semblence of a collection at this juncture is truly an achievement in itself.
The Attico Fall 2020: Of Joy and Anxiety
The collection is a joy; feathers, sequins, decadent colors matched with monochrome black and white looks, a beautiful balance of structure and movement. These are clothes for someone who takes Fun very seriously. The pieces evoke images of a barefoot partier at a piano, martini splashing on the music stand, smudged mascara, banging out Elton John tunes without a care in the world.
But that’s just the thing, right? These clothes were birthed into a world with quite a lot to care about. Typhoons of anxiety tear through our empty streets and in our little apartments, in our living rooms as we attempt to homeschool our children, at the kitchen table as we scan the headlines for scant clues of economic recovery.
The genius of the presentation is that Ambrosio and Tordini embrace this common feeling of claustrophobia and angst while beautifully showcasing the joie de vivre inherent in The Attico brand. The tightly-framed photos – cropped just too close for comfort – and stark red or white backdrops lend themselves to a mood of bleak constriction. The emotions, the clothes, the poses are all just a bit too big for the frame, too loud for the backdrops, too emotional to be scaled to fit. No walls are visible, yet they don’t need to be: the sensation of entrapment is so keenly executed with that deviantly-close framing and composition.
Rising Above the Saturation
It’s that tension between the stark confinement of the editorial page and the decadence of paillettes, comical Big Bird yellow feathers, and vampy low-backed gowns that rings so true for this moment in history.
The way that the photography grates on the nerves – or at least, on mine – is painfully congruent with the raw-edged emotion that so many of us are feeling in the pandemic. Our lives suddenly feel too small, the “there-not-there” walls too close, without any mercy of a pressure valve in sight.
The result is a super-saturation of all those human emotions we used to throw around willy-nilly. We’re bathing in them, and at times it feels like we’re suffocating in them.
Yet, as I’ve learned through filing through The Attico’s collection, what rises above that saturation is a persistence of joy.
Why not?
Why not wear the feathers? Why not play the piano in last nights’ makeup? Let that martini splash around a bit? Why not let all those feelings be?
“We all want to feel beautiful, and to imagine ourselves in the freedom of a better future,” the pair said to Vogue in a phone interview. I admit though, to feeling a sense of gratitude to these women for the art they’ve created – and not for an imagined, freer future. What they’ve done is acknowledge that the present – excuse my French, there’s no way around it – sucks b@lls. They’ve acknowledged the discomfort and given us permission to be with it, permission to be angry, permission to rant, and above all, permission to find our joy in the midst of it all.
love,
Stig.
Photo and information credits: Vogue Runway
Shop the Post
You don’t have to buy fashion to consume it – but should you get the itch, here are some The Attico pieces for you to enjoy:
