Born in Genoa in 1999, Lucia Carmagnola is an emerging fashion designer who lives and works in Milan. We meet in Niguarda, a neighbourhood in the northern part of the city, which since 2018 has accompanied her professional growth, influencing her stylistic restitution.
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During the Milan Women’s fashion Week 2023, on the occasion of Upheavel, the three-days event in which Acre Hub presented 3 emerging designers, we interviewed Lucia Carmagnola, fashion designer and founder of the brand Punto_zero.
Together we talked about his personal view of fashion, fabric as a form of expression and his relationship to postmedial aesthetics.
“Who said that all fashion has to be like all fashion? What I do, I do because it allows me to find a diversion from what I do not like in the reality in which I live. It would be incoherent for my own identity to submit to models that try to impose one and only one right way of feeling and behaving” – Lucia Carmagnola
Born in Genoa in 1999, Lucia Carmagnola is an emerging fashion designer who lives and works in Milan. We meet in Niguarda, a neighbourhood in the northern part of the city, which since 2018 has accompanied her professional growth, influencing her stylistic restitution.
One year after the foundation of her brand Punto_zero1, we present a reading key to understanding her artistic research. A conversation in which Lucia talks about herself, putting her creations in the foreground: “manifesto garments of a post-medial eye2, which in their structure reflect the mutability of my present”.
“Mine has been a path made up of instinctive choices and needs; since I was a child, my mother taught me that I could try to express myself through alternative languages; as I grew up, I kept her advice.”.She adds: “Initially I painted, then I realised that the pictorial result did not satisfy me. So I started to approach textiles, a more tangible condition of the material. The act of sewing allows me to connect ideas to everyday life, to find a compromise between what is in my head and what is in front of me”.
In 2022 you launched your brand Punto_zero, whose anniversary you celebrated on 25 February 2023, with the Meta-trama3 event within Acre Hub’s UPHEAVAL format. Describe your identity and what lies behind the shapes you propose.
“Punto_zero is about a condition of constant redefinition, my clothes constantly changing, they behave like the number zero. Think of the value this number has in a number, depending on where it is placed it takes on different meanings: 10 – 100 – 0.001 – 10.000 (…) – that’s how the clothes I make behave. If placed on a hanger they can’t stay there, they shrivel up or fall off, they need a body to be dressed to be defined”.
In Punto_zero’s creations there are neither sartorial conventions nor precise sizes. In this way, they seem to want to reflect a real dimension, free of illusions and staggering aesthetic embellishments: “It is the garments that mould themselves onto the bodies, respecting their curves,” says Lucia.
“I started sewing when I asked myself what I wanted to wear. Initially, I experimented to feel comfortable with my body, then it all became less self-referential because the need to make clothes that made me feel good was amplified to the plural”.
From her debut to the present day, Lucia explains that she perceives herself more consciously. While she initially associated her creations with the fragility of a second skin, currently the image with which she tends to identify them is that of armor: “A state in which the condition of the epidermis is supplemented by a load-bearing skeleton that makes them stronger“, but of which she reaffirms: “Despite this acquisition of my own security, the need to arrive at a form that expresses a sense of acceptance for what is perceived as not aligned with the rule remains central to Punto_zero”.
“I have often been criticized for doing unsalable things, and it sometimes happens that I feel out of place in certain work circumstances. As everyone knows, the fashion universe is difficult and aggressive, so my ‘defensive weapon’ and primary ambition has always been to remain true to myself, without behaving the way most high fashion circles would have you believe you should”.
With this, Lucia reiterates that she does not want to imply that she disassociates herself from spectacular formats such as fashion week:“I would be hypocritical to say this because they are part of a game I have chosen to play. However, I have no problem pointing out that I consider these initiatives to be old fashioned; they bore me. I say this without wanting to appear arrogant, but because I am tired of seeing the big media stages give voice, only and always, to a small niche of people’”.
Grey atmospheres, knitting and computer codes characterise Lucia Carmagnola’s expressive vocabulary: a branched imaginary that emerges between the influence of the Milanese suburbs, the Genoese alleys and her fascination with new technologies and the web. Four different retrospectives, which however have in common structures driven by a constant swarming of energy. Viewed from this perspective, the designer’s work fits into an artistic category that is nowadays identified as postmedia4. A term that is nowadays tightly grasped by the Gen Z of the digital born, which in this context refers to the dissolution of specific and conventional mediums to constitute works, works and artistic creations. According to the relative point of view5, today the role of creatives becomes comparable to that of technical programmers, as they aim to bring together multiple stimuli, derived from everyday life, in hybrid displays that are far removed from past mediums.
Talking about this line of thought, Lucia recounts: “In 2020, while I was doing my thesis research, my attention was caught by the doll from the ‘Mental Wealth‘6 commercial, launched by Sony Playstation in 1999, directed by Chris Cunningham7” – “The image of that girl with an altered face, very reminiscent of an extraterrestrial physiognomy, became a sort of alter ego for me. That encounter with her was the one that made me embrace my misunderstood way of expressing myself; and it was from there that I realised how I needed to communicate”’. She concludes by adding that the visual perspective of that digital world and the reading of texts such as Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘CTRL+C, CTRL+V (non-creative writing)’8 allowed her to approach questions such as the crowding of the visual field and the status of authorial authenticity in relation to what the media flow proposes.
Quiet and determined, the designer starts with the personal and then reflects on collective themes, such as the dissolution of certainties with regard to the future and the slippage between the real-virtual spheres.
Lucia Carmagnola seems to sew a weave all around herself; a pattern with an irregular but connected mesh, which metaphorically translates her attitude towards those she meets and which concretely becomes the distinguishing feature of what she proposes with her collection: “Punto_zero for me is to go beyond what you see in order to express what you would like to see”.
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