Angelo Flaccavento

Contributing Editor at Business of Fashion (BOF)

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Articles

In Shanghai, Fresh Energy Despite the Downturn

3 weeks ago | businessoffashion.com | Angelo Flaccavento

The last time I touched down at Shanghai Fashion Week in March 2019, nine months before the Covid-19 outbreak, the Chinese economy was booming and the event, brimming with energy, was poised tomake the leap to fashion’s major league. Six years later, a lot has changed — but not all for the worse. During the pandemic, when China was closed to the world, buyers embraced local designers, giving the country’s domestic fashion scene a boost.
Jonathan Anderson at Loewe: The Ultimate Designer-Curator

1 month ago | businessoffashion.com | Angelo Flaccavento

It comes as no surprise that Jonathan Anderson is officially exiting his role at Loewe. No men’s show in July; an exhibition-like presentation in October; a long silence on his personal Instagram broken in recent days by a carefully curated retrospective of his best moments at the Spanish brand — the clues were everywhere.
Paris Day Nine: Fashion Is a Kitchen, Not a Laboratory

1 month ago | businessoffashion.com | Angelo Flaccavento

PARIS — Fashion brands need a clear vision, even more so at this critical moment for the industry, and too often labels fail to communicate with clarity. But fashion is a kitchen, not a laboratory, and brands need recipes, not formulas, if they are to resonate with customers. Anthony Vaccarello is unafraid to stick to a clear concept per outing.
Paris Day Eight: The Case for Intimacy

1 month ago | businessoffashion.com | Angelo Flaccavento

PARIS — Big fashion spectacles are becoming a tired concept. In Paris, even the billion-dollar brands have scaled things down amid budgetary pressures and the sense that luxury has become too mass. Rei Kawakubo said on Saturday, “smaller is stronger.” It’s certainly cooler. Louis Vuitton is the world’s largest luxury brand, but its show was dramatically smaller this season.
Paris Day Seven: When the Clothes Do the Talking

1 month ago | businessoffashion.com | Angelo Flaccavento

PARIS — Who needs brand storytelling, so trite and fabricated, when the dialogue between clothing and body can do all the talking? It happens rarely, but the seventh day of the Paris shows offered glimpses. Urgency was on Balenciaga designer Demna’s mind this season: the kind of urgent desire for a new item that has been missing from fashion for so long. Ever the acute social commentator, Demna explored this sense of urgency through the symbols and standards adopted by tribes of everyday people.
Paris Day Six: What Is Wearable?

1 month ago | businessoffashion.com | Angelo Flaccavento

PARIS — Is challenging, conceptual fashion still a valid proposition these days? The issue of what is wearable and what isn’t was top of mind on the sixth day of the Paris shows. Rei Kawakubo has long stopped presenting fashion on the Comme des Garçons runway, opting instead for something that is intensely sculptural, lyrical and touching, if completely unwearable. Her concoctions trap the body, moulding it into otherworldly shapes, while conveying thoughtful ruminations on the world around us.
Paris Day Five: It’s a Process

1 month ago | businessoffashion.com | Angelo Flaccavento

PARIS — In the age of stuff, the process is sometimes more interesting than the product. “To go forward, you have to go back to the beginning. To me, that’s about the atelier. It’s the heart and soul of Givenchy,” said Sarah Burton after her debut at the house’s Avenue George V headquarters. Each seat was a stack of brown paper parcels: a reference to a cache of calico patterns from Hubert de Givenchy’s 1952 debut that was recently found in a cupboard at his first office at 8 Avenue Alfred de Vigny.
Paris Day Four: The Power of Randomness

1 month ago | businessoffashion.com | Angelo Flaccavento

PARIS —In a highly curated age, there was power in the sense of randomness which ran through the collections on the fourth day of Paris Fashion Week. Rick Owens is never haphazard: there is a weird and wonderful sense of control that rules his world.
Paris Day Three: Poise and Manners

1 month ago | businessoffashion.com | Angelo Flaccavento

PARIS — The relationship between gestures and clothes has been a key preoccupation for designers this season, and the third day of shows in Paris was mostly about poise and manners. The otherworldly beauties imagined by Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford were a vision of self-possession bursting with the powerful eroticism that comes from apparent chill.
Paris Days One and Two: A History of History

1 month ago | businessoffashion.com | Angelo Flaccavento

PARIS — The opening days of Paris Fashion Week were all about history. “Orlando” was clearly in the air at Dior, where designer Maria Grazia Chiuri used Virginia Wolf’s tale of transformation as a way to explore, not so much gender (even if the goings made for a very Lady Oscar-like face-off between romantic gowns and mannish frocks), but the way shapes and sartorial tropes evolve over decades and centuries, projecting different visions of femininity.