How a fashion editorial was born is what I ask myself every time I flip through a magazine and I collect inspirational pictures, tearing the pages to keep them somewhere else. Coated editorials, are those were at the bottom you can read popular names of fashion designers, photographers, models and stylists, as the final result of decisions took around a table. But how a fashion editorial was born, here, is quite another thing.
How a fashion editorial was born is a matter of feelings first of all
Of course we are in empathy with someone more than others. There are people with whom we don’t need to talk because we share the same emotional sphere that can transform objects, sounds and colors into a story to tell. Each of us has an own way.
“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. ” – Ansel Adams
That’s how words, gestures, sounds, but most of all memories are mixed when you are there, ready to communicate something that until that moment has remained just a secret.
“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
We don’t instinctively know how a fashion editorial was born
Elisa and I have known each other for a short time, but it seems we have the same emotional reference world where we draw each time we start a new photographic adventure. In our minds the storyboard has been defined slowly, almost without speaking. There are phrases and feelings shared between WhatsApp and a Facebook chat. The pieces of our history are added gradually one to another.
A dress found by chance in a closet. A sort of retrocognition that leads us to tap into a reservoir of universal memory and allows us to live past events or never existed ones. That dress itself does not remember anything neither to me nor to Elisa, but both remind of something far away. Through that dress our minds are lost somewhere in the collective memory.
The same thing happens with the search of the mirror. That mirror was another piece of the faded picture that it was getting ahead in our minds. Is it the instrument to look inside? Is the attempt to go beyond the appereance or the self-celebration of ego and vanity as modern Daffodils who want to forget the world around?
The story of how a fashion editorial was born is about a story within a story
When we entered to Villa Celimontana, maybe for the firt time, we were sure of ourselves. A woolen lace dress, an antique mirror and the desire to create something melancholy, hidden from 2 meters of tulle burgundy.
The melancholy of passing time, of Christmas that makes us think, the desire to obscure the uncertainties and wait for the light. The desire to be silent in order to find those sounds and voices again. The possibility for a moment, a minute or an hour, to stop the world and try to look within it.
The way to get some fresh air and space for action, rather than give up to excessive behavior and unnecessary controversy.
And maybe this editorial has already been written in advance and we were just the means.
“We should leave moments as they were when we had lived them.
Never groped to repeat them, to live them again“ – Heinrich Böll
si ringrazia la mia amica Lavinia Caldani per lo specchio e la presenza costante nel supportare me e quello che faccio
