Luchino Magliano’s show was held in a gymnasium bathed in dark light and vapor. A thunderous, strident soundtrack by Berlin composer Aase Nielsen set the tone, both melancholy and violent. Romanticism and grit were the extremes converging at boiling point, where Magliano’s restless imagination sizzles and erupts. The Magliano cauldron, where he pours memories, illusions, despair and deceptions, is a recipient from which a magical narration can emerge as a vital, powerful force.
The Adriatic riviera romagnola, where Magliano grew up, has been a traditional holiday destination for quiet family life, but its flat, endless beaches have also acted as a theater for excess and debauchery. Wandering there at night in winter, the darkness is a shroud that can turn from tender to ferocious. “The sea, the night, the winter: what a fabulous threesome,” he said. Magliano embraces tension as a lifeline, the lodestar for the gritty poetry that underpins his practice.
The set was a sandy catwalk replicating the passerelle crossing the flatness of the beach, almost disappearing into the water at Lido di Spina, the seaside resort where Magliano spent his childhood. “It’s not an exotic destination; I wanted candor, authenticity, the search for a violent moment of revelation that brings hidden emotions to the surface,” he said. “Far from the euphoria of summer, and into the melancholy of winter darkness.” It was a search for beauty à la Magliano—raw, crude, yearning for the truth of the nude body and of the soul. Clothes as languid, ambiguous archeological shells incrusted by fragments of memories and by the elegiac spirit of the authors Magliano loves—Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Cesare Pavese, sublime writers with a tragic destiny. Loose, minimal, barely-there jackets in muddy colors were made in chiffon and voile; insouciant trousers were crafted in transparent mohair; crêpe-de-Chine was turned into padded outerwear. They were incongruous pairings, bringing the fragility of inconspicuous fabrications to the surface, reversing their meaning and function, distorting their nature: A process both aggressive and nostalgic.
“You cannot fight chaos with chaos,” Magliano said. “I’ve come to quite like the word ‘basic.’” The tempest of inner turmoil had to be counterpointed by simplicity as a refuge. A simple pair of knickers was “worn” over a ladylike bag by the twin sister designers of Medea. A new line of sensual ‘basics’ called Nudo by Magliano—fleeces, hoodies tied and knotted around the waist, tank tops revealing the torso—hinted at the “desire for breathing space” and reduced the complexity that comes after the laborious unearthing of memories from the past: the worn-out scarf that was your Linus blanket as a kid, the braces for crooked teeth turned into earrings, the T-shirt emblazoned with the distorted logo of the Cocoricò, the legendary gay nightclub in Riccione home to “generations of outsiders.”
For Magliano, romanticism rhymes with defiance, it’s “an excessive gesture.” That’s why the force of his message resonates, because it comes from a place of personal truth. At today’s show, fellow designers Veronica Leoni, Sabato De Sarno, David Koma, Niccolò Pasqualetti, Simone Bellotti and Adrian Appiolaza were there in support—they’ve got the memo.
