TRANSFORMER
News
Edition 89
20.05.2021
is the title-theme for the fall/winter 2022-2023 trends
Uncertainties, adaptation, and ability to change are the hallmarks of our times. These are difficult, amorphous, indefinable times punctuated by periodic adjustments we have to make, sometimes from one minute or hour to the next. We have to be always ready to change our plans, to review our positions and stances, to modify our daily lives according to new rules and paradigms, and we have to do it quickly – even if we don’t exactly know what is going to happen and what the end results of these adaptation processes will be. Fashion, in general is a mirror of this situation dangling between present and future, between the status quo and the unknown, between the classic and the avant-garde. Classic in the sense of reassuring certainty and avant-garde as research and progress, projections towards dreams and imagination. Change seems to be the right word because it is the best fit for these times: change as transformation – and transformation is cyclical and inevitable, like the seasons.

TRANSFORMER is the title-theme for the fall/winter 2022-2023 trends. Transformation is highly energized. It isn’t easy to summarize it in just a few words: it is a concept intrinsic to life, nature, biology, mathematics, and sports. It is a change of state that we want to grasp and describe through three moments and three aspects that seem particularly important at this time. Transformation of the body, of spaces, of things in the sense of “devices” for our daily lives.

BODY
The body – its physicality and spirituality – is the tool with which we acquire experience in our daily lives. It is our tool for feeling, understanding, and dealing with others and with space around us. The body is transformed during a lifetime. The body has changed/transformed during history. It has been perceived with a new shape bound to culture, to customs and to its role and value in a given period. Like society that from solid became liquid and from liquid became gas, the body too has changed form and expressiveness the way it is depicted in the visual arts. And its meaning is changing too. While waiting to understand what form it will assume this time, we will tell the story of the vigorous and equally elusive transformation of our world today through images. 

SPACE
Even our perceptions of the environment and spaces has changed considerably. These times make us think about what spaces are: private, public, physical, virtual. Our jobs change and the places of our lives, our sociality and everything that can affect our personal and interpersonal worlds are changing. The distinction between home and office has disappeared just like between home and gym, home and movie theater, home and store. Our homes are being transformed into spaces for living, working, meeting, and leisure. The home and hence the architecture where we live and experience our physicality and spirituality. In this theme the concept of space comes together with that of the body, giving rise to a vision of architectural and spatial fashion in symbiosis with the environment we live or just happen to be in. Real or virtual spaces inspire graphics and perspectives on clothing “building-in” glimpses of new “interiorscapes”, flat and apparently rigid surfaces such as walls or screens that conceal or reveal the body. Knits are becoming more and more part of interior and object design precisely because they are so adaptable and transformable. 

DEVICE
The transformation of spaces and the interpenetration of body and space lead to the transformation of the things we use in our daily lives, and always increasingly inside the home. This new lifestyle will be demanding more physical activity and reactivity. Our home furnishings will be multipurpose and will adapt to the several duties they will have to fulfill during the day. After breakfast, the living room furniture will become the office and after work, the gym. And our clothes will be just as transformable. The same garment will be fine for a video conference and for a workout immediately after or between one call and the next.