Italian Fashion Icon Angelo Flaccavento

Intro: Sabrina Ciofi

Words: Angelo Flaccavento

Angelo Flaccavento is one of the best fashion journalists of today. Young enough to still be a talent, he is old enough to be reknown by the international fashion audience as one of the most brilliant pen in the fashion system. The culture who rooted him, Flaccavento was born and raised in a South Italian bourgeois family, is evident in his writings as well in his style. A real gentleman and an elegant thinker, Angelo Flaccavento is an icon of good manners in men’s dressing up. In the name of our friendship and trust, and according to his fascination with the work of our multitalented menswear fashion editor Giovanni Dionisi, Flaccavento decided to put his own identity in the hand of Dionisi and deconstruct his style. In the protective shell of the historical walls of the Grand Hotel et de Milan and under the eye of our genius photographer Luca Campri, Angelo Flaccavento shown one of the many unfamiliar aspects of his personality. Few words written by himself will take you on a journey inside his clever mind and his multifaceted person.

Sketch

A self-portrait in broken lines.

Fill up the blanks as you wish.

I am a joker hidden under conservative layers.

I am bearded, bespectacled, a writer and a dreamer.

My most important possession is a pen.

Not a bowtie, nor even a necktie.

I, for me, stands for: isolation, independence, insularity.

D for: disorder, disappearance, duplicity.

Discipline, I’m sure, is not a dirty word.

I like asceticism, nihilism and ridicule.

I embrace paradoxes, contradictions and absurdities.

I know that nothing lasts, nothing finishes, nothing is perfect.

I am taken by flaws, errors and imperfections.

I prefer immaterial to material, precision to perfection, furry to smooth, subtraction to addition.

The smell of ink makes me think of kink.

I can be brutally honest, just as much as I am constantly making it up.

You decide.

I believe in mindscapes. Reality is a product of the imagination, if Wallace Stevens was right. I believe he was.

My favorite activities are: deceiving expectations, looking like a priest, pretending I’m a pornstar.

Everything and nothing, I think, is possible at once: it’s not what you do, but how you do it.

A little mistake, something wrong, for me, is mandatory.

A, for me, stands for: abstraction, absence, abandonment.

H for: horny, hairy, humble.

V for: vain, visceral, visionary.

The imagined life of books, films, paintings, music and dreams thought me all I know about style.

I keep fit by thinking and dreaming, walking and reading.

Things that inspire me: exoticism, bohemia, London in the 60s, early punk, Irving Penn, Sarah Moon, Richard Avedon, mid-century modern, rococo, masks, brutalism, Leigh Bowery, decadence, decay, sublime landscapes, solitude, radicalism, idealism, japonisme, minimalism, maximalism, classicism, order, chaos, mistakes.

I prefer the process to the product.

I can’t stand arrogance, vulgarity and primadonnas.

I enjoy keeping distance, using gentleness and manners as my shield.

Steamed rice is my comfort food, followed by ice cream.

Once, I was fat.

I try to do more, with less, and enjoy deprivation.

I bare it all when I cover up.

I cure horniness with pink satin ribbons.

When I look utterly proper, I am not wearing any underwear.

My biggest regret is living in a country with a glorious past in art and humanities ruined by the filthiest mix of politics and TV.

Total white is my idea of bliss.

I am adamant that what is personal is always political. Ditto for everything that is esthetic.