text by Angelo Flaccavento
Once, on a car ride to visit textile mills in the Piedmont region of Italy, a billboard at the entrance gate of a factory got my attention. It spelled out: Change is inevitable. The slogan hit the spot. It became a sort of mantra. Indeed, change is inevitable: an inexplicable force of nature, a dynamic principle one simply cannot resist, nor escape. Change is exciting just as much as it is excruciating: you never know when it is going to happen and where it will lead. One can just go with the flow. The unknown: is there anything more exciting?
When it comes to fashion and creative activities, however, change is also a sort of commandment. As such, far from satisfying a deeply human urge, or releasing a bolt of energy, change turns into a fabricated need: one that can easily result in addiction—it is elating, after all—and, consequently, erosion. When this happens, which is in fact every given second in this data and image-saturated era, change turns into something deadly rather than healthy, limiting rather than liberating, unnatural rather than natural. In the end, change becomes a bad thing, because it’s not even change, but a coating of varnish over nothingness, a forcible application of makeup, so to speak, limited to the surface of things, with no effective outcome. A waste of energy: that’s it.
Modernity thrives on change and renewal as the only values that truly count. It’s the epitome of modernity. Modernity is fast, forgetful, and has an insatiable hunger for more modernity. Digital media and the culture of global connection have made this appetite monstrous. Fashion, being the pinnacle expression of modernity, brings such proclivities to a farcical level, be it in the production of objects and artifacts, or in the creation of images. The only mantra that counts, in bold capitals and bolder exclamation marks is: NEXT! There is not even time to digest the metaphorical morsel. The hunger for newness arises while chewing, so to speak. It’s paradoxical, in a way, but oh so evident: what is the height of desirability and the embodiment of one moment, becomes obsolete and despicable the next. There is no way around it. Actually, the more modern a thing is, the more obsolescence is fast and merciless.
Within this senseless frame, change becomes a veritable burden, an inescapable crux. It’s not only what keeps the industry going, but also what keeps commerce afloat and consumer engagement alive. The shared assumption, in fact, is that one has to reinvent the wheel at the fastest speed, because a new piece of work is per se better than the one before, just because it is new. It’s the idea that incessant renewal is the sign of true creativity, which means there is no time to really hone and fine-tune ideas, and it all gets rather destructive, for the brain as well as for the planet we inhabit. But hey, blame such detrimental fury on capitalism.
Don’t get me wrong: there is not one single rule that’s good for all and applies to all. Change is the creative currency a bunch of creators naturally handle—Picasso, anyone? Ms. Prada, too—while there are others who devote their entire career to fine-tuning one single idea—Mr. Armani, above all; Constantin Brancusi, perhaps. Both routes are valid; generalizing is bad. What truly matters, in fact, is sticking to one’s guns, listening to one’s instinct, and following it.
I’m finally getting to the point. The above detours around change were just a door to the guts and instincts I meant to commend. Ever-changing or timelessly still, being true to oneself is the matter here: carving one’s own niche and confidently inhabiting it, not looking for approval or validation from the outside. This requires a lot of focus, stubbornness, and quite a dose of self-esteem, not to mention the ability to make one’s instincts clear and operative. The system is a seducer: it gets close as easily as it drifts away, and this can corrupt and make one lose purpose. Having the guts not to care requires a certain heroism if not a little egotism. It’s an endless fight, probably, but one that is creatively rewarding and intrinsically corroborating, because it connects to the guts of the inner animal within us.
Staying in one’s own space is what matters. The density must be high, in order to sit above the trifles and minutiae that are so desperately essential everywhere else. Sticking to one’s guns is a matter of mastery. So is the certitude that one can only be modern once in a lifetime, and the rest is, at best, maintenance. Within this mindframe, it’s better to build one’s own shed, so to speak, rather than desperately trying to catch the uncatchable and ending up desperate, with no direction home. On top of that, true modernity, which is not the modernity that is so easily praised everywhere, is timeless, no matter what they say. Once modern, always modern. Time will single out and celebrate the masters later. It’s a question of patience.
Sticking to one’s guns means instinctively expressing who one is and what one feels, avoiding the cheap tricks designed to conquer the market, sell nothingness and gain some kind of highly forgettable relevance from it. There is no other way than to take the time to hone one’s formula. That’s what makes a creator unique. Being one’s self, after all, is an act of endless repetition, day after day. It’s an act of poetry, too, which is also a perfect metaphor to cherish repetition above senseless change. As a finely honed activity of constant verbal and formal refinement, poetry revolves around a bunch of topics—feelings, mostly. Love, loss, or melancholy are what they are, and yet there are millions of ways to express them. Poetry is about modulation in repetition. It’s about telling the same things all the time while telling them differently each and every time. It is a matter of subtlety, be it a whisper or a shout. Subtle: an almost punk stance in these most blatant of times.
That’s it, reader. Authenticity matters, and the only way to be truly authentic is by listening to those deep-steeped instincts, even when they are contrary to one another. The animal within knows better.