Are you scared? - Francesco Mottola
Francesco certainly has something very deep and intimate to tell. His fashion project tells a story of subversion of consolidated standards. Extremely interesting, fun and entertaining in its own way.
Tell us your story. How did your journey into the world of fashion start?
My path began many years ago, the passion for fashion and the desire to become a fashion designer has been with me since my childhood. My relationship with fashion started like this: watching every day the famous movie “The Devil wears Prada”, creating clothes with blankets for my models = sisters, organizing fashion shows in the hall of our home and leafing through magazines like Murfy and Vogue for years, thanks to the newsstand run by my mother. My official path started right when I decided to stop any other passion, sport and personal to exclusively focus on what I wanted to become my job. I accomplished my high school education in a professional institute in Alessandria, Italy (IIS Nervi - Fermi) that had a fashion department. A path that lasted 5 years, full of small experiences and collaborations, with one qualification and diploma as a fashion and clothing operator. Thanks to this path i could have a smattering on the textile world and on the history of costume and fashion, developing a great illustrative capacity in fashion design. Thanks to this school I realized that I wanted to learn a lot more and make that one big dream I had in my drawer since I was a kid, reality. So after several insecurities I decided to start my university education in Italy, in particular with a three-year course at IUAV of Venice, department of fashion design and multimedia arts - a path that has developed greater personal theoretical and design preparation; it made my creativity emerge letting me focus on it - which ended a couple of weeks ago.
What is the concept of your latest collection?
My latest collection has also become my thesis project, precisely because I didn't want it to be a concept, it had to have different meanings in order to highlight my no-labels work. My work was born from the readings of Umberto Eco’s “Storia della Bellezza e della Bruttezza”, being involved very quickly in the issues of ugliness, deformed and medieval mythological monsters. Sifting through fantastic creatures and popular beliefs in the medieval era, a project that departs from reality came to life, against the rules that society imposes to be respected.
The project was born from the idea of something frightening, but during its development acquired a more ironic dimension. It makes you change the established perspective of a monster thanks to shapes, fabrics, and above all colors. See how the Camp unconsciously transformed starting idea of the project . There is also the influence of a world of fairy-tale’s monsters and children's stories, because designed monsters are much closer to the playful and ironic ones of certain invented tales like something terrifying and scary. Look and creativity are not conceived as something simple and conventional, but as a manifestation of one's vision of the project, which is detached from the common idea of clothing belo gong to people who see fashion as a simple aesthetic phenomenon. My project is a personal escape from the creative negation and against all those figures who try to coordinate everyone’s thoughts, limiting them into something exclusively rational. Instead of being an image that we can find without difficulty within the collections of the great international brands, it makes emerge a different personality not approved from most of people.
What does inspire you most?
Imagination.
How does the place where you live affect your style and your creations?
Venice is a city of art, surely its carnival spirit may have influenced my work. But I don't think it is the place that influences my work, but my mood, as I noticed in these years of training, my mood greatly influences my creativity. However, the place can connect perfectly to the mood, because it is also by the energy and emotions that a place conveys that your mood changes.
What do you recommend to keep your creative thinking active?
My answer is in your question. Never stop thinking, keep thinking and putting in I discuss my thoughts, analyzing my work and thinking about it later in a different way. Everything around us can be an inspiration, just think about it. My advice is to do not believe that something is stupid and obvious, if a thought is studied it will never be, and above all never limit your thoughts just because they seem absurd to us in a context like fashion. Everything that surrounds us can be inspirational and can be new if developed with your own sensitivity and vision of things.
What is your next project?
My next creative project? Increasing my latest collection. The next one depends if I want to keep, for the first time, fixed issues that come from my current job or how often do I analyze new situations, concepts, stories. For my personal life’s projects, if Italy has nothing else to say to me besides "nice, good job", I am ready to move abroad. Time has always been one of my biggest fears, and I've been dreaming about my future for a long time. all I want is to avoid seeing myself hidden for decades inside a fashion house that already made it. I want to find a place where the craft is taught and is given space to young people experiment with their creativity too.
