March Editorial

The shows of this fashion week should have been a big party and consolidate the recovery of the sector after two difficult years and instead ended in the unreal silence of the Armani show. “My music is the heartbeat” says King Giorgio excited, saddened and shaken like all of us in the face of what scares us and that we do not know: a war in Europe. Yet it really seemed to have started well this week, with so many foreign buyers, full shops and even the sun blessing the newfound normality in Milan. The announcement of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (let me tell you, without any justification) plunges everyone back into dismay and fear. And among the many indignant comments in the face of the aggression of a free people, which I fully share and to which I join, reflections, much less justified, have also begun to circulate, on the dystopian contrast between the bombs dropped from Moscow and the fashion week Milanese, considered the quintessence of extreme frivolity, the realm of luxury and futility.

The fashion week, if someone had not yet understood it, actually represents the work of hundreds of thousands of employees in a sector that is worth 90 billion euros in turnover and is in effect the second item of GDP in the Italian economy. “Stop the fashion shows”, shouted indignantly on social media, is a meaningless statement given that the fashion money that enters the state coffers contributes, for example, to giving us free healthcare. The real problem is that a part of society still associates the fashion world with something useless and annoyingly flashy, rather than with a sector in which Italy excels in the world and which is therefore strategic and fundamental for our country. And I doubt that the responsibility for this distorted and reductive vision of what is actually absolute excellence is also due to the story that traditional media make of fashion itself, dealing with the creations of designers only when they are crazy and exaggerated or on occasions of financial scandals or romantic relationships of the protagonists. Fashion has always told about society, anticipated trends, photographed the world we are experiencing with a strength, creativity and power that cannot be dismissed as frivolity. And the choice of Armani, the greatest of all, to have the models paraded in the absolute silence of the room, is a very strong sign of the sensitivity of this immense designer towards the dramatic situation we are experiencing. It is very easy to write insults on social media to Chiara Ferragni who posts “the best of these days” showing super glamorous images at the same time as the harrowing images of Kiev, but to associate the important and much less visible work of hundreds of companies that in these days culminated in fashion shows, is trivial as well as wrong. Now the fashion shifts to Paris, as it should be, while Putin announces the nuclear alert.

Instead of railing against fashion professionals and writing senseless vetoes, let’s try to use social media for a much higher goal: to stop people like Putin who have no respect for democracy and freedom. We organize peace marches, we direct our indignation towards a dictator who does not respect the sacrosanct rights of national autonomy and democracy. And we thank a giant like Armani who in the face of these confused days of war and fashion week, between the optimism of the recovery and the abyss of a conflict that affects us closely, in the midst of an early spring and the threat of a winter that looks medieval, without adding unnecessary words he was able to give a strong sign of dismay, incredulity and pain. Silence.

Thanks Giorgio.