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.