ADORNING OURSELVES ON BURNING GROUND

Aesthetic waste at the Milan Fashion Week.

We never really see the consequences of the things we buy. Even less when they are wrapped in papal purple, satin-like pouches.

A combination of grandeur and dilapidation, the chaotic high tide of Milano’s fashion week, resembles a state fair for aesthetic waste. 

Carbon footprint, contrary to its name, is not to be seen by the naked eye, especially when standing together with roller-skating rink candy-colored garments. How to render visible what’s not manifested here? Would the impact value actually show if we all wore beige corduroy this week? 

Wrapped in vegan leather, streets are animated by the biyearly ritual. The drive for accumulation does not stop at drapes and duds but expands to an arresting spectacle of invitations, flowers, flights, water bottles and decorum. Nevertheless, casting low-energy lighting over a dumpster of eco-friendly cups, the rite attempt changes. A drop in the bucket.

In the confusion of how to better position themselves after a Zoom-infused year, the industry reaches for an emotional and immediate impact. Dead-stock materials and organic yarns can be disappointing lovers when looking for thrills. Now fuelled by our only recent body-to-body reality, the eroticism of capital takes the shape of edible thong invitations and screen-friendly inflatable dolls. Body vulnerability is blown out of proportion with proud poses, legs spread wide.

Eyes sunken into screens, protagonists with busy schedules fly in for fifteen minutes of grand gestures, all jam-packed onto uncomfortable chairs. It’s funny, but also not. 

Fossil fuel over mohair knits, a nomadic honeycomb of networking.

Still, beauty seems to me a noble passion, and environmental concern often fails to counter my yearning for aesthetic bliss. But even the purest affective capacity is never context-free. Garments turn to bitter idols, and what tradition cannot support anymore builds intellectual scandals: the archaic system of seasonal shows, ingrained misogyny, and the refusal to acknowledge the future death of our sun. At best, the persistence of the show's calendar could be justified by a quest for expertise. But exhausting and disorganized, the learning curve seems to have come flat.

Adorning ourselves on burning ground, we could not kill the industry if we tried. 

The circulation of desire is an endless pilgrimage within the repressive structure of capitalism, and we seem to stick to the path with quite some dedication. Yet I do believe frivolity is a serious business, and the philosopher’s disdain for dressing and grooming leaves me disgusted.

Indulging in pleasure, later on, repenting in shame. Between liberation and restraint, I cannot fight being affected and Milan turns into the biggest playground for my capitalist guilt. Like grounded children, Milanese residents, are cut out of the theater frame, while the audience swells with online image sharing. Can desire go on without a screen?

Affective transactions are being made with libidinal energy, and obsolescence becomes painful to look at because it has the nerve to look so good. Is fashion week a legacy or a debt? Somehow, somewhere, we made the mistake to believe that we are actually not in charge of our own traditions.

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