Dear Director Feltri,
She is a particularly elegant man and I read some of her interviews in which she declared that she was very attentive to details and to appreciate well -dressed women, who do not exceed, perhaps wearing too short skirts, too low -unwilling clothes or too high heels. So I am wondering if you share the rules established by the organizers of the Cannes Film Festival relating to the Dress-Code to be adopted on the red carpet: you don’t have to go too discovered. A choice of elegance or intolerable imposition?
Sofia Conti
Dear Sofia,
It is true, not only I take care of my style and the way I introduce myself to others, even when I find myself in my house, that is, among my family members, but soon also be careful in the way people, both men and women, wears, walks, move. A few decades ago wearing the jacket and tie or well made clothes, with a tailoring cut, clean, fragrant, perfectly ironed, constituted a form of respect towards others and also towards themselves. Today the sloppiness triumphs, vulgarity seems to have become fashionable, the excess is rampant. I find it hateful, for example, the torn jeans, those who confer that desperate aspect to those who bring them, as if these had just been attacked by a pack of wolves or by a group of panther, miraculously managing to get out unharmed. If it were for me, I would abolish certain garments or accessories, such as the backpack, that more and more frequently men have on their shoulders, sneakers, the heels that seem pitches, the almost non -existent skirts, the dizzying necklines. But for sure I would never dream of dictating rules on how to dress. It is a fact of freedom. Furthermore, elegance cannot be imposed by force or absence can be punished. Either there is or is not. Everyone must be able to express himself freely also through what he slips. That’s why I absolutely cannot share the decision to prescribe obligations and rules on what to wear and what not to wear to participate in the Cannes Film Festival. Moreover, it is an artistic manifestation, where even more certain freedoms should be safeguarded and not suffocated, since art itself is only emancipation, redemption and redemption from everything that suppresses who we are, it is freedom to be. I read in this choice, namely to establish a dress-code that actually prohibits discovered meat, a cultural and ethical regression, a jump back in our Middle Ages, the claim to restore, as has been said, decency, as if too deep a split was obscene and indecorous and could lead to the arrest by the moral police, which happens in certain Islamic regimes, where women are even punished and even tortured, raped and finally kill if they do not correctly bring the veil. Are we inspired by Islamic autocrazies? Is this the model of us Westerners? Now scandalize our skin? Today is it indecent to discover and these rules are placed, can it be a crime tomorrow? The first step is taken.
Yes, Sofia, I appreciate elegance but I would never sacrifice the freedom for this, that freedom that we have conquered and which is placed at the basis of our civilization and our legal systems. Freedom also to be ugly, if it is the case, dressed badly, succinct, tacky, unwatchable. At the moment when a group of moralizingers draws up a regulation of this type, evidently believing that it is legitimate to order a woman not to go around too naked because it would seem a slut, under penalty of forced removal, there is to worry. If I had been a star, I would have deserted the red carpet or I would have rebelled by covering only the essential with the fabric.
And then who has the task of determining if the centimeters of skin exposed to the air are too many? Is there a unit of measurement? Parameters have been fixed, and by whom? Is everything based on the sensitivity of the person responsible to perform such checks aimed at evaluating the degree of decency of the girl who is about to parade in front of photographers and paparazzi? Who was the power to judge a decent or indecent woman delegated?
All this smells so much of extremism, of obscurantism, of exasperated moralism. In one word, of Islamism.
I remember there is a part of the world where women die
To affirm and defend the freedom of their kind of dressing as it seems to him. In light of this, that in this other part of the world to the ladies it is unjust to dare, exhorting them to cover itself, is true indecency.