Since the collaboration with Alessandro Jumbo Manfredini has finished, PIZZA has got a new art director. It is Alessandro Gori which creates and communicates the new Italian fashion image from his Laboratorium. He comes from Tuscany and he is about 30 years old; he gave some of the most important projects of Italian fashion culture a graphic identity: the catalogues of the exhibition  ‘Lo Sguardo Italiano’ cured by Maria Luisa Frisa and Stefano Tonchi; the catalogues of  ‘Lei e Le Altre’, ‘Diana Vreeland After Diana Vreeland’ and the book ‘Una Nuova Moda Italiana’ cured by Frisa. It was Gori to create the graphic mark for Pitti Immagine, the company that works on fair and has become the bulwark of Italian fashion in the world.
His approach is easy but sharp and it is defined by knowledge, elegance and a creative instinct led by his plain and decorum-adverse way of communicating. This is a mark which brings electro- industrial sounds, minimal rock and jazz experimentations with toccata and fugues in the best pop expressions.
It all has started in 2008, when Gori made the font that inspired us for PIZZA logo.
Welcome home Mr.Gori.

What is Laboratorium?

Laboratorium is a nomadic entity, a changeable unit of people, which work individually or in a group, and even in different places; they try out the strategies and languages inside the communication process, with different attitudes. Is it intense? I like to think Laboratorium reasons by following the quantum logic, corpuscular and undulatory. Since I was attending school I have been thinking of Heisemberg, the fact that you cannot see and determine, at the same time, the subatomic particles position, and most of all the fact in the infinitesimal dimension the matter behaves like the energy and vice-versa. It appears, and then it disappears. Yet everything’s there and works! A magical alchemy. That is Lab, brought to life after me and Maria Luisa (Frisa) have met during the new millennium first years. We used to work from a distance by telephone or e-mail, a flood of e-mails. But then Serena (Becagli) has come and with her a physical and white epicentre in Florence. But distance and wondering still inspire us today, giving us the opportunity of carrying on our own projects. It is a motley group of people who don’t get frightened by the difference and change.
On this wave, some collaborations for Pitti Immagine’s press campaign were born and thought as a series of pictures, almost completely Italian fashion landscapes of fashion communicators’ creativity: we have started with young artists and then photographers, stylists and illustrators have come to us. In scattered and incomplete order, these are the people who have come and gone: Andrea Spotorno, Nico Vascellari, Marco Pietracupa, Andrea Gandini, Pablo Arroyo, Sissi, Rossana Passalacqua, Peppe Tortora and Valentina Ilardi, Tanya Jones and Andrea Artemisio…
If you put the tuner knob forward, you’ll see books, catalogues, exhibitions and an awful lot a work related to the theoretical and experimental aspects of communication, which turns into the action we are really fond of, at Lab. “Bowlingcervello”, I am making mine a Marcello (Maloberti) word that I really like. Working on the projects at the beginning of their creative process, following the whole research or a part of it is a stimulating and unpredictable way of operating. That’s the way I succeed in getting the heart of the work and having an active part in suggesting procedures to reach the right materials visual performance, the theories to state, beyond aesthetics.
In the book “Walter Albini e il suo tempo. All power to the imagination”, which is such a good title that I have to report it whole, cured by Maria Luisa Frisa and Stefano Tonchi, the lettering is inspired by the one Albini used for his communication. WienerForWalter is a font I designed for titles, thinking of a type Albini used in writing paper, being himself inspired by Wiener Werkstätte. A simple example may hide a Chinese puzzle of quotations and reproductions: that is exactly what Albini did, and what fashion had started to do on the wave of postmodernism, at that time.

What do you expect from this work?

This is going to be a different experience, a new opportunity to grow up, try out, and collaborate with new people. So interesting! So exclusive! Thanks for that!
During these late years, Milan swarms with independent magazines – Grey, Hunter, Unflop for fashion, Mousse and Kaleidoscope for the arts- there are so many that it’s hard to quote them all. A very rich scene. It’s amazing how everybody’s working on very high standards. Keeping on handling the rhythm and give different wavelengths some space is going to be challenging. I will commit myself with passion!
I worked on many books, but on two magazines, only: Fruit of the forest, a digital magazine of design, and Sides a magazine which was born with the idea of widen the commercial catalogue’s form – a project thought for womenswear fairs Pitti Immagine arranges here in Milan. PIZZA will be the third…

In your opinion, what’s the Italian Taste?

Pizza, pizza, pizza… and a mandolino!

What are the benefits of working as a team?

Increasing the points of view, gaining in richness, confidence, interaction, sharing.

Translation credit: Chiara Ferrara