Fabio Quaranta: interdisciplinary collective instead of fashion brands, archives instead of collections – «I felt the need to lose the authorial, individual aspect»
Lampoon introducing Fabio Quaranta
What if fashion lacked the purpose of embellishment and singular artifice, and became a study of the body and its part in morphing times? Fabio Quaranta is an Italian creative, fashion lecturer at the IUAV University in Venice who opens up the conversation on menswear with his collections and collaborations. In 2016 he moved the MotelSalieri Shop from Rome to Milan, enriching the fashion capital with a creative hub shop. You can find him at the intersection of art, study, and collecting, a fashion space that doesn’t have to do with beautification but instead is informative and suggestive.
One of the latest projects called Urania designs a refuge for the intersection of arts, from music, design, and fashion, where they can interact in an interdisciplinary manner.
Fabio Quaranta – Urania collective project
Maria Hristina Agut
How did the Urania collective project emerge?
Fabio Quaranta
Urania started several years ago now… I can’t tell you precisely when, but I felt the need to lose the authorial, individual aspect that is often present in fashion. In my collection project made in my name, I felt a heavy weight, and therefore I felt the need to find another way to express and carry forward projects that on paper were not only mine. Nothing is born only from my head. My collaborators and the people around me are all part of the project and, therefore, even more so with Urania which initially only envisaged collaborative aspects – there were editions made with other people.
the spin-off, Urania Not Original
Maria Hristina Agut
The collective and community-oriented side of fashion
Fabio Quaranta
We continue to do collaborations with other artists, such as Diego Perrone. Last year, on the other hand, this Urania spin-off called Urania Not Original was born, precisely because it is part of a non-authorial project, which instead deals with ready-made, starting from my archive that I have been collecting for about thirty years. Here in the studio, we sorted it out. It was a bit scattered everywhere, among boxes, so we put it together and discovered there were plenty of pieces that were thrown away, just staying there.
Fabio Quaranta and the Urania’s U
Maria Hristina Agut
What Urania represents in the context of fashion design and production
Fabio Quaranta
I have been teaching at the university, at the IUAV in Venice, for more than thirteen years, and therefore very often I get in touch with young people to understand what is the future of fashion design, what is the sense of producing more or less beautiful items and putting them on the market. These reflections led us to take this archive and edit it.
Editing it means, we have divided it into categories, it is not an archive of value. I am not a collector who has imagined this process of collecting with the possibility of reselling it, so I have it from garments taken in the markets from second-hand shops hand also designer clothes because I liked the shape, the fabric, because I liked the garment itself, because I liked the detail, for so many reasons, certainly not to show it. And so a sincere archive came out.
Sincerely because it looks a lot like me, it looks a lot like my work and it looks a lot like my idea of fashion. We just marked them by putting a patch representing the U. We embroidered this patch that is Urania’s U to define them in a moment in space and time, to then let them go free. It means that after the presentation the garments are on sale and will leave the archive for a new life.
At Macro Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome
Maria Hristina Agut
How did the Urania project evolve?
Fabio Quaranta
We started with this project last year in our spaces in Milan with a floor display of work and military garments. We did the second act at the Macro Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome with evening garments, especially regarding men’s pieces such as tuxedos, morning suits, and evening and menswear. We took them to Rome to do a show about women.
It was intriguing not only this reprise of the garments and therefore the ready-made, but also what a garment means. To put a garment that had been designed, built, and made for an orchestra conductor in 1952 – because among these garments there was a tuxedo suit of a client of Domenico Caraceni, from 1952 -which today meant putting it on a woman.
The same garment was translated seventy years later in a contemporary art museum on a body from 2023, without altering the garment itself. What value does the garment have by remaining the same and therefore changing only by de-contextualizing it?
Archive is about authenticity that rises from privacy
Maria Hristina Agut
With the intimate process of retelling pieces designated for masculine figures, Fabio Quaranta offers an alternative to upcycling techniques. Fashion houses envision repurposing fabrics and garments through alteration, conveying personal visions. For Urania, Fabio sees the garment as self-sufficient and meaningful in its own sartorial and aesthetic structure. His archive is about authenticity that rises from privacy, from collecting something aimlessly but intentionally.
Fabio Quaranta
It’s not upcycling. We made sure not to modify anything on the garments, even where there were holes, or where there was a worn lining, we wanted to leave that expression of the garment, of time, and of the multitudes of people who saw it, touched, worn and therefore that layering that the garment tells.
Contemporaneity needs history knowledge
Maria Hristina Agut
As a teacher, what do you observe and consider talent in fashion nowadays?
Fabio Quaranta
I think the ability to intuit contemporaneity. Undoubtedly talent isn’t a technical skill, but it’s understanding what’s happening and what happens tomorrow. It is a belief that it is needed, that is cultivated by curiosity but also by the knowledge coming from understanding what happened yesterday. It is necessary that the talent to express oneself must still have strong cultural baggage. I’m not talking about fashion. Students often say that the best designer is the one who knows how to talk about contemporaneity. And talking about contemporaneity means knowing history, living in the present, and imagining a future. I believe this is applied talent.
Quaranta: a designer should imagine garments for everyone
Maria Hristina Agut
What about menswear which is a fairly marginalized theme? How does menswear fashion interact with contemporaneity?
Fabio Quaranta
Starting with the idea of contemporaneity in fashion and then applying it to men’s clothing. A person doesn’t have to know what’s contemporary in fashion, but he has to know what it’s like to be living in 2023 with everything that belongs in 2023, knowing the different points of view. I think that a contemporaneity of fashion doesn’t exist pulling it out of a contemporaneity of life.
As for menswear, that’s also a good question, and I think we can talk about men’s wardrobe, but we can’t talk about menswear anymore. It seems like such an old word. I believe that it no longer exists, if only for the basics like garments, and accessories such as a suit jacket. They can belong to a wardrobe, in a men’s wardrobe for example, but I don’t think there is any longer a definition of men’s clothing. A designer, precisely because he has to live in the contemporary world, should design and imagine garments for everyone.
The choreographer Annamaria’s collaboration
Maria Hristina Agut
You also integrate performance in your work and the way you choose to exhibit clothing. What part does it play in the Urania project?
Fabio Quaranta
Talking about the collaboration with the choreographer performer Annamaria Ajmone, they are cables imagined for this project that we have been carrying out together for a year and a half now, and the idea of space. Therefore, it depends on the place and the clothes. There’s no sound, there’s no music, there’s only the body.
Body is a crucial issue in the garment. A garment without a body is that famous Caraceni tuxedo that hangs in the archive. Before, it had the body of a man who was the conductor; today, it has the body of a woman or a girl in 2023. Without the body, it remains somewhat suspended. This collaboration helps my work, allowing me to understand the relationship between clothing and the body continuing this research that particularly interests me.
There’s no good or bad, only coherence – Fabio Quaranta
Maria Hristina Agut
In terms of research and muses, what are some of the things that inspired you?
Fabio Quaranta
If there is something or someone who has changed my professional life, at least from one point of view, it is this Russian poet and writer, Iosif Brodski. Urania comes from his poem collection titled To Urania. The realization is that he talks about an error, he talks about the incurable, and he talks about the mistake made in the search for beauty. It is the result of research that is not interested in beauty. It has changed the way I see all things. For me there is no good or bad; without rhetoric, there is a way of doing things that is one hundred percent coherent or incoherent with one’s idea, and beauty is unequivocal. There is no absolute beauty beyond nature. So what we can reproduce is only something that tends along other paths, certainly not looking for beauty.
Fabio Quaranta
Fabio Quaranta studied economics but entered his fashion career by giving a new interpretation of menswear, imprinted with modernity and Italian tradition. He won Who’s On Next 2010. Next to his label, from 2010 he is also a Lecturer of the MA degree in Visual Arts and Fashion at IuAv University of Design and Arts in Venice, Italy.
Editorial curated by Spring Studios for Lampoon
Photography Clara Borrelli
Production @Spring Studios
Creative Director Anouk Jans @Spring Studios
Sr Art Director Simone Lorusso @Spring Studios
Producer Carlotta Cannata @Spring Studios
Videomaker Andrea Dal Martello @Spring Studios
Styling Giulia Parenti
Grooming Francesca Rezzola
