Fashion Creativity must be restrained: only if you are constrained, you push it forward

When fashion can no longer expand through excess, it turns inward: constraints on materials, production, and image become the new territory where creativity proves its intelligence and its force

Creativity constrained: imposing limits on your craft

Someone raises an eyebrow. Limits sound like the opposite of what you want to hear. The opposite of what you expect from a mentor, a teacher, an employer. The best among them explains the mechanism: constraints sharpen ability.

The fence is already there. It asks for discipline. Outside sits almost everything: bright, aggressive color; noisy prints; nylon threads that hold any structure; polyurethane padding; resins; plastics; elastic yarns that permit any fit. What stays inside the enclosure, within reach of your hands, to express creativity? Nothing?

Something stays. A master among the many talkers explains the point: creativity expands by drilling downward. It penetrates. It elaborates. It digs into detail. Skill means building something new with little. Creativity rarely depends on abundance. Rigor produces response. Compression produces craft. People say Flaubert spent whole nights contorting himself to write three lines.

Microplastics: designing without synthetic fibers, choosing natural fibers

The news circulated widely: microplastics have been identified in atherosclerotic plaques. An Italian research group—University of Campania, with the Istituto dei Tumori in Milan and Harvard Medical School in Boston—reported a higher cardiovascular risk when plaques show microplastic contamination. Microplastics have been detected in placenta and breast milk, liver, heart tissue, sperm. The main sources of microplastic pollution include tires, cosmetics, textiles. Polyethylene and PVC appear everywhere. Against this background, sequins still dominate too many conversations.

The starting point has shifted. A contemporary designer begins before the sketch. The first move is manufacturing impact. Then supply-chain discussion. Then fiber selection. Natural fibers first.

Synthetics, when used, demand separation. Keep them away from wool. Keep them away from leather. Avoid texture mixtures that push seams toward failure, whether stitching uses cotton or nylon.

Boredom yawns. Mood-board prints scream. Both distract. European regulation targets microplastics intentionally added across categories: cosmetics, scrubs, makeup; textiles, with direct pressure on glitter. A contemporary designer has reasons to drop glitter and move on.

Who are Prada’s customers today?

Let’s speak in the feminine. Do the original Prada women still exist? The clients who understand daring, the irony of ugliness, awkwardness turning into carelessness: the fast small step walk, half heel, high pelvis, cardigan at the waist, skirt below the knee, hem lifted a hand’s breadth. Do women like this still exist, or does the room fill with girls imitating what they never decoded? Girls who diminish the Prada uniform, with no sense.

Inside a Prada show, coherence holds. Outside, do these women occupy real streets? The contradiction keeps moving or keeps resisting. The origin remains decisive: remove the foundations, and the building tests its own standing. Ms. Prada keeps reminding reactive Milanese bourgeois circles that every misfortune can become laughter, then debate, even with a guy from Belgium. Intellectual irony. Today, approaching the numbered seat, the eye catches a different front row: bored pretty girls, many named Chiara, heavy makeup, too many sequins. Next to them sits a journalist who keeps trying, and not succeeding.

Fashion: obsession as engine

The fashion industry lives under obsession with Prada. Another obsession sits deeper: Hedi Slimane. Prada stays visible. Slimane stays unapproachable,. Obsession turns silent, intimate, private – nowadays, such fashion obsession gives everybody a sense of dullness. The fashion industry—distinct from fashion itself—reads as a community of obsessed people. Success tends to reward obsession.

Fashion industry means more than people who make and sell clothes. It means a system producing graphic design, photography, funding for art and cultural institutions, gravity for students worldwide. The upstream question stays open: does the industry hold enough intellectual equipment for its obsessions?

Fashion and sustainability: interest stays thin, creativity stays essential

Fashion shows little interest in sustainability. Move past complaint. Look for creativity—yes, even through polyurethanes, elastics, plastics—then demand strong creativity, a risky drawing, an unprecedented idea. Something with force enough to influence everything else, the way fashion claims it can. This is reaction. Creativity earns its name by finding solutions still outside imagination.

Creativity shows up in Duran Lantink. Clothes detach from the body. Volumes appear. Irony meets nonchalance. A sculptural approach dominates. The statement aligns with fashion’s core: beauty holds no fixed standard. Aesthetic norms resist standardization. Previous generations and corporate managers face this shift.

The debate opens between diversity and uniqueness: difference from others, or ease inside one’s own uniqueness? Girls with masculine pectorals and breasts moving over male legs. Jeans that resist wearability and push toward painting. Editorial value sits inside the product. No photographer required. No magazine context required. A dress like this turns any picture viral, even a shot taken by a four-year-old child.

Conversation reduces to virality? At least people talk. The financial question returns: funding for projects like this, sales to buyers and end customers. A show staged in an office. Rough details. Free, independent—for now. PR becomes a lever: enough to build a business, or enough to inflate awareness until a financial group buys the package and pays the creative director a salary.

Another doubt follows: PR behind Duran Lantink—strategic design, or fashion-industry frigidity, self-indulgent, sterile? Fashion entrepreneurship: living practice, or a race to secure an investor fast enough to outsource the problem?

Hyper-consumerism: Anna Wintour and Trump as a shared posture

Much of what appears in Paris serves commercial brand development: Anna Wintour’s realm. A figure once associated with power, now framed as an icon of American consumerism. Professionally, Wintour condenses many reasons behind fashion’s crisis.

Fashion’s reputation problem reads clearly: a system orbiting attitude competitions and frivolous coolness; a system where public relations outrank substance; a system that evaluates everything through follower counts on Meta. The era shaped by Trump and Wintour amplifies the pattern. Different domains—war and oil for him, plastic and parties for her—similar posture.

Back to Milan: the city’s two orbits

You can sense it in the air: disillusionment with fashion as a system. The industry reads as financial rather than creative. Sophisticated codes fade. Ambition weakens. Patronage becomes performance. The business turns numerical, algorithmic. Milan splits into two orbits. Two circles. Opposed attitudes. Different people.

The first orbit is loud and ostentatious. Shouting, money, plastic surgery, consumption without remorse. Club culture as a public square. Dolce & Gabbana, Cavalli, even Versace in a state of disarmament. Garments built from chemically extruded fibers, psychedelic prints, glitter everywhere possible, anything to lift the bust and animate the body. Italian trash-TV as an aesthetic reference. This orbit demeans Milan’s culture.

The second orbit shapes Milan’s identity: Armani and Prada as synthesis. A city that works. Snobbishness as understatement. Taste evolving through Gardella, Magistretti, Studio BBPR. Structural intelligence. Intellectual speculation applied to architecture, literature, civic life. A city where ready-to-wear formed as a system. An ethos rooted deep enough to reach Federico Borromeo. People in this orbit stay silent while the others scream.

Writing about fashion: technical connotation, poetic connotation

Writing about fashion often means adjective inflation and personal taste judgments. A little tailoring vocabulary to look competent. Historical notes plus a quip to smuggle gossip as news. Newspapers and blogs fill with signatures of journalists who light up greeting famous figures, who protect friends, who enjoy belonging to an elite.

At Lampoon, adjectives are forbidden. Writing about fashion remains an attempt. Squeezing and scraping the brain. Searching for layers that can stir curiosity in people who say: fashion means nothing to me. Fashion, in its technical connotation, is the codification of products that increase sales in markets. Fashion includes more than clothes: commercial images that strike the collective and evolve into popular culture. Fashion generates imagery for the mass economy.

Carlo Mazzoni