Anti-fascism is not binding and goes with everything. And so the creative director of Valentino, the stylist Alessandro Michele, a communist until he became rich, opened the show of his new Spring/Summer collection the other day in Paris with a text by Pier Paolo Pasolini on the disappearance of fireflies. Read by Pamela Anderson. From Idroscalo di Ostia to Baywatch. For Michele, “The resistance to fascism in Pasolini’s time teaches us to awaken our gaze in these difficult years”. Title of Repubblica’s correspondence from Paris: “Poetry to resist the darkness of fascism”.
Dark atmospheres, fairy lights, outfits, feathers, gold fans and clementine-colored silk jackets. Pier Paolo would be horrified.
We were missing the anti-fascism that also slips into shorts and bon ton suits. Executioner who abandons the show.
In short, while in Rome the policemen were attacked by the violent wing of ProPal, in Paris the Valentino show opened by quoting the poet. And we don’t want to know whose side Pasolini would be on today. Certainly the Left has no longer sat “in the wrong” in a Brechtian manner for a while now. But on the right side of the catwalk.
It’s strange though.
We were taught that Pasolini, who disgusted look and fashion, did not use fireflies as an act of resistance to fascism. If anything as a metaphor for the disappearance of peasant civilization overwhelmed by industrial society.
Request. But when will anti-fascism no longer be in fashion?