ISSUE NO. 31
In the Covid-19 years we have seen collaborations of fashion brands with award-winning directors, such as Dior and Matteo Garrone and again of Luca Guadagnino who delivered a portrait of Salvatore Ferragamo. The Milan Fashion Film Festival forges a partnership between the fashion and niche-movie industry.
The award ceremony that took place on June 19th in Milan gives recognition prizes assigned by an international jury of fashion experts.
The goal of the Fashion Film Festival is to bring together on stage, first through digital and then physically, photographers, creative directors of brands, founders of inclusive projects, directors both already active in the industry and newly emerged.
After several years of being held online, the Fashion Film Festival is being celebrated in Milan in an event featuring the setting of the historic Odeon Cinema. The perception is that the fashion universe in all its aspects comes together in this movie theater to honor all the people involved, from designers to music producers and creators.
The coming together of emerging talents in every field and established professional profiles, allows the Film Festival to represent a springboard for the artists of tomorrow, with a focus on extending this possibility to the world at large. In fact, as many as sixty countries are eligible for the Fashion Film Festival Milano, and submissions reach over 1,000 films per year. From these, about 200 are selected for each edition, which then go on to compete for the final prize in each category.
Some of the year’s jurors include Massimo Giorgetti, Founder and Creative Director of MSGM, Michelle Francine Ngonmo, Founder CEO Afro Fashion Week and Black Carpet Awards, Emma Hakansson, Founder of the sustainable organization Collective Fashion Justice and Sarah Bassett, Creative Director.
This year the FFFestival wanted to experiment regarding the growing possibilities of technology and digital in film production. For this reason, thanks to the creative direction of Gloria Maria Cappelletti, editor-in-chief of RED-EYE Metazine, a new category was created, that of Best Metaverse Fashion Film.
The call therefore also involved artists and directors who wanted to try their hand at production through artificial intelligence and Web3 technologies.
The awarding of this category itself took place in the metaverse, within the Spatial platform, where Cappelletti met with the makers of the selected films in the virtual space created for FFFMilano. For this category, the winner is The Digital Rituals, directed by Reiki Zhang, which explores different ways of being within the context of Web3.
The three-minute film questions the future possibility of connection and intermingling between the real and the digital. In this respect it thus rethinks all those purely human rituals and the forms they could take in this context. The rituals examined are those most primitive but also related to religiosity, along with the events that mark the lives of human beings such as birth and death that are transposed into the metaverse.
Among this edition’s jurors, Michelle Francine Ngonmo, CEO and Founder of Afro Fashion Week Milan and the Black Carpet Awards, highlighted the need for diversity. Black goes far beyond skin color, Ngonmo explained, and has always been conceived as a color that can be associated with a negative concept. Through the inclusion of thoughts and cultures and the work the founder is doing with her projects, it is possible to create an effective confrontation.
In projects such as the Fashion Film Festival, Ngonmo continues, there is a clear need to enhance talent, going beyond mere showing up and the need to demonstrate the diversity that many profess today. And this is what is evident in the subsequent awarding of the Best Styling category won by It Is Not Spring, Until All Flowers Blossom.
The film saw the debut of the YA YI brand collection created in honor of those Chinese immigrant workers that are employed in garment factories in New York. The title of the film is also inspired by a strike called primarily by women workers that occurred on a spring day in 1982, from immigration to civil rights the short film explores a range of issues through clothing.
Terra Cene is the title of the short film that won the award for Best Green Fashion Film, directed by Rodrigo Inada and NONO -Nono Ayuso-. The connection between human beings and the Earth is explored according to the principle of placing the latter at the center in three different moments of time: the past, the present, and the future.
The question this film asks is «who and what will be left to remember?» at the end of it all. The passing of time punctuates the rhythm of life of human beings and seems to herald an end of the world already marked from the beginning of the planet.
To better understand everything, the voiceover explains, we must begin at the end, and so begins the backward journey that traces the short film. The main message brings attention back to a positive vision of the future that sees humans as responsible for maintaining and preserving the Earth and the lives that inhabit it.
Although the festival aims to celebrate different workers in the world of fashion, visual content creation, and film in particular, designers remain a focal point. As many as two awards are dedicated to them, one for Italian creatives and one for those who have presented work internationally.
Best new designer/brand and Best new Italian designer/brand are the categories in which in addition to talent for communication and message effectiveness, a more or less emerging brand is rewarded in perspective. For the former, Tal Maslavi was awarded the prize, who through the film Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, referring to the ASMR videos that are depopulating on social media, expressed her concept of dress up to the representation of an edible tank top.
«In my final collection, I examined the human need for touch, interaction. Looking at the ease with which we have expropriated our senses in the transition to digital life», Maslavi explains. For the Italian category, the winner is Sara Battaglia, who through the staging implemented by model Anna Cleveland wanted to ironize the usual way fashion wants to take itself seriously.
In the wake of enhancing talent, especially younger and emerging talents, and cultural diversity and inclusion, the first Latin American Fashion Awards were born. Constanza Etro, former founder of the Fashion Film Festival Milano, together with Silvia Arguello conceived this award in order to highlight the area’s creatives and enhance them in the fashion system. The first edition will be celebrated in November 2023, which aims to promote Latin American talent in the world.
A further goal is to support the development of the Orange Economy, the commendation related to forms of art and creativity that can have a way to materialize through goods and services becoming a big economic source. Among the themes addressed by the award participants will be a special focus on inclusivity, diversity and connection to places of origin.
Every year, FFFMilano invites leading personalities in the art and cultural industry to declare the winning and nominated films in 15 award categories.
ISSUE NO. 31
Lampoon is a cultural magazine.
Culture today means sustainability – in its honest meaning.
Culture has always been about human respect, tolerance. It’s not only about accepting human diversity but it’s about searching for the beauty of every human peculiarity.
Inclusion is the first value that defines art. Culture today means one thing only: to be part of a community, to think as a community.
Reading Lampoon, you see that these themes are smoothly aligned. A good part of the articles’ content discusses practices to restore our environment and stories about understanding the others.
Reading Lampoon, you find a dialogue between science and creativity. From sharp and edgy photo sessions to fashion, architecture, technology – the commitment is dedicated to a future that is all about us – together.
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