The radical elegance of Magliano's FW21 collection

Pavese and Pasolini, the popular processions with unfolded flags that may befunerals or protests, the collective life of the fresco, the embroidery of handkerchiefs and starched collars. These are the suggestions that Magliano's FW21 collection evokes, theatrical as an opera, told through a video directed by Tommaso Ottomano – the same author and director of BODY, the film that will be presented with February's Digital Cover n.05 of nss magazine and whose trailer you can see by clicking on the link. For the video that accompanies the collection, named Magliano Forever, a cast of characters inspired by class and peasant struggles that celebrates a surreal funeral rite for an angel who fell into the frescoed halls of Villa Arconati di Bollate. 

The range of garments is narrow and concise – a collection that wants to evoke pavese's lyrics, suspended between mythology and peasant civilization, but also Le Belle Bandiere di Pasolini and class struggles. A collection therefore on which, in the same words as the designer, «a particular patina, symptom of the time passing, sedimented in the Magliano wardrobe», symbolized by tweeds and almost archaic, durable fabrics, reminiscent of ancient work clothes. Not for this reason, however, Luca Magliano has renounced his usual irony and his innuendos, inserting in the cast of his characters the "Cruiser" and the "Frocialist" alongside workers and peasants, the punk group CCCP, the memories of the writer Yukio Mishima and the activist Angela Davis.

Magliano's FW21 collection is an example of how a designer manages to travel through time, albeit a recent past, following the thread of his obsessions, mixing narrative registers but also stylistic and aesthetic, to produce a show that, in its re-enactment of the myth of a working class animated by thoughts of revolution, also tells something about our complicated present.