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A hush fell at Paolo Carzana’s first London presentation as people stood around, entranced by his hand-made visions of beauty and tenderness. There were delicately-wrought apparitions of angels in diaphanous head dresses—clothes conjured into being out of self-invented textures and the threads of Welsh history—and all this woven into a collection with a clarion-call of a title: “Imagine we could be the ones to change it all.”

Small and low-budget as Carzana’s rite of passage into the public domain was, it lived up to the fascination that’s surrounded him since he posted “Another World,” made in lockdown last year—his one-man, zero-budget, upcycled, naturally-dyed collection suffused with the purpose of fighting the many demons that beset his generation. “It’s the idea that there’s an alternative way of doing things, and an alternative world to exist in, against the rise of false, fake curated online reality,” he told Vogue at the time. “I want to show that we, who share the same beliefs, can be the antidote.”

So, finally, viewers were able to absorb the first physical materialization of this most analog of youth leaders. As models took turns to make their way onto a set to be photographed, there was the chance to step forward and examine the intimacy of Carzana’s framing of bodies: his tiny shirts cut to tug open on the torso, strips of semi-sheer fabric falling asymmetrically layered and gathered into soft, padded zones; Welsh tapestry blanket-coats with bodices softly tailored into them. “Tender tailoring with strength and fragility,” is how Carzana described it.

The Welsh blankets hold a meaning close to his heart as someone with Welsh-Italian heritage. “They’re traditionally given to couples that are marrying. A gift of love.” Heading off a question about whether his work is intended as menswear, he added, “I think it’s for everyone.”

The skill of his details has as tangible an imprint of authorship as might a ceramicist or cabinet-maker—he’s evolved his own way of sewing tiny, raw-edged French seams, making hand stitched sheer leggings, and inventing trouser-flies fastened with a device without buttons or zippers. “It comes from the brain, it comes from the heart,” he said.

Carzana’s seraphim, one dressed in white, one black, were walking in almost ridiculously fragile chiffon ballet shoes, held together with tiny stitches. Arising from their backs, airy asymmetrical wings hovered on weightless frames. Almost invisibly, pairs of transparent hands—gloves, but not really—could be seen protectively embracing their shoulders.

He described the collection as “A 24-hour journey from dark to light,” an odyssey which obviously symbolizes something of the feeling of exhilaration of coming out of the pandemic. There are more layers to it, though: an offering of hope for a generation battling against anxiety, and a practice he’s dedicated to sustainable, vegan, organic and expanding exploratory research into non-harmful processes since he was a BA student at Westminster University. Already a pioneer outlier of his generation in 2018, Carzana’s graduate show had vast, monstrous patriarchal beings sitting on the models’ shoulders which were dangling gross, manipulating, gloved hands over them.

Five years on, that controlling terror is exorcised and purified and put into the hands of Carzana’s care-taking angels.

The title of that graduate debut, “The Boy You Stole” ominously spoke of a trauma, (which Carzana has never spoken of directly) as well as embodying a larger generational fear and furious helplessness. But over years—through his Masters at CSM—that extraordinary chemistry of personal feeling and larger social vision fixed within him a messianic desire to make work which harms nobody and nothing.

That is Carzana now: heralding progress by being it. “In the beginning, people would always question me, as though using fabrics and dyes that don’t damage the environment was going to be some kind of deterrence,” he remembered. “But I think it makes it so much easier. Because as soon as you create something, it feels like it’s yours completely.”

The ecru looks, he pointed out, “have been dyed with X-amount of tea bags, and orange spice. The midnight gray on the coats and knitwear took hours and hours of dyeing with acorn or logwood.” The silk-look fabrics are Tencel, or eucalyptus—renewably grown and cruelty-free. The squashy, organic-form bags are Pinatex, made from waste from pineapple crops. Another luxurious black coating material was donated by Sarah Burton, part of her Alexander McQueen initiative to redistribute deadstock to young designers and students.

Paolo Carzana’s talent has already attracted its own choir of guardian angels. He is a resident of the Sarabande foundation, where he teamed up with fabric artist Semin Hong and jewelry designer Mairi Miller. Nasir Mazhar, the multi-talented London milliner, helped Carzana bring his gravity-defying angel wings and tiny spiraled-tulle caps to reality. Behind him, too, are the art teachers and other educators who supported the working-class boy who was bullied at school for his differences, but has turned out to be a brilliant creative force of his generation.

That, in a way, is an old, old story in fashion. The connection that Paolo Carzana feels most deeply is with Alexander McQueen himself, whose legacy is the Sarabande Foundation. Carzana dedicated the show to him. He knows how lucky he is to find likeminded people to collaborate with, to be able to chorus something collective. “It’s really saved my life,” he concluded. “I don’t think I could live if I didn’t create.”