March Editorial

The runway shows of this Fashion Week should have been a grand celebration to consolidate the industry’s recovery after two difficult years; instead, they concluded in the surreal silence of Armani’s show. “My music is the heartbeat,” says King Giorgio, moved, pained, and shaken, like all of us in the face of what frightens us and what we do not know: a war in Europe. Yet, the week had truly seemed to start well, with many foreign buyers, full shops, and even the sun blessing the rediscovered normalcy in Milan. The announcement of the invasion launched by Putin against Ukraine (let me say it, without any justification) plunges everyone back into dismay and fear. And among the many indignant comments regarding the aggression against a free people—which I fully share and join—reflections have also begun to circulate, far less justified, on the dystopian contrast between the bombs launched from Moscow and the Milanese Fashion Week, considered the quintessence of extreme frivolity, the realm of luxury and futility.

Fashion Week, if anyone has not yet understood, actually represents the work of hundreds of thousands of employees in a sector that generates 90 billion euros in turnover and is, for all intents and purposes, the second-largest item of the GDP in the Italian economy. “Stop the shows,” shouted with indignation on social media, is a meaningless statement given that the fashion money entering the State coffers contributes, for example, to providing us with free healthcare. The real problem is that a part of society still associates the world of fashion with something useless and annoyingly flashy, rather than a sector in which Italy excels globally and which is therefore strategic and fundamental for our country. And I suspect that the responsibility for this distorted and reductive vision of what is actually an absolute excellence is also due to how traditional media portrays fashion itself, covering designers’ creations only when they are wild and exaggerated, or on occasions of financial scandals or the protagonists’ romantic relationships. Fashion has always narrated society, anticipated trends, and photographed the world we are living in with a strength, creativity, and power that cannot be dismissed as frivolity. And the choice of Armani, the greatest of all, to have the models walk in the absolute silence of the room, is a very strong sign of this immense designer’s sensitivity toward the dramatic situation we are experiencing. It is very easy to write insults on social media to Chiara Ferragni for posting “the best of these days” with super glamourous images alongside the heart-wrenching images of Kyiv, but to associate the important and far less visible work of hundreds of companies—culminating these days in the shows—with that of a global influencer is banal as well as wrong. Now fashion moves to Paris, as it should, while Putin announces a nuclear alert.

Instead of railing against fashion professionals and writing senseless bans, let us try to use social media for a much higher goal: stopping those who, like Putin, have no respect for democracy and freedom. Let us organize marches for peace; let us direct our indignation toward a dictator who does not respect the sacrosanct rights of national autonomy and democracy. And let us thank a giant like Armani who, in the face of these confused days of war and Fashion Week, between the optimism of recovery and the abyss of a conflict that touches us closely, in the midst of a spring that arrived early and the threat of a winter that seems medieval, knew how to give a strong sign of dismay, incredulity, and pain without adding useless words. Silence.

Thank you, Giorgio.