Federico Cina FW24 at Milan Men Fashion Week

Federico Cina FW24 at Milan Men Fashion Week entitled Colors of Nothing.

Description about Colors of Nothing – Federico Cina FW24 / Fall Winter 2024 :

Every shift of being is brutal and ruthless. As every clean cut is, every crossing, every threshold leading elsewhere. The act of undressing is equally brutal: we put away clothes and ornaments, remaining with nothing on, accepting only the essential. To grow up, to become an adult also seems to be brutal. All those gestures that split our lives into a before and an after, inevitably mark a clear division.

What color can distinguish the moment when something changes? Just like during winter a lingering figure makes its way through fog, its outlines are blurred at first, but in the distance a silhouette emerges and becomes progressively sharper as it approaches. The complete view of that figure will be brutal, inevitable and precise.

What color could that undefined fog ever be? Could it be gray, like the winter it belongs to? Could it be dark like the night and the fields it shrouds? Could it be transparent just like those many layers of cold sheerness that overlay into an indistinct dust?

Federico has posed himself these questions, reflecting on the moment when, at a certain point in life, something inevitable happens: we face the world, reality, things for what they are. In that moment, in the confrontation with the cold, far away from the bliss of unawareness, something definitive happens. A change, a deviation. We grow, and we find ourselves different. We decide to abandon what is no longer needed, perhaps leaving it behind in that very same fog.

How does one feel in the act of change? Probably vulnerable, defenseless. Yet, something rises up, along with the confusion, a sort of ease with this new form of being. Stripping oneself is brutal, but it is also liberating. Just like clearing away the fog and seeing what it hides is. Letting go of what is no longer needed is a relief to the soul.

Federico cares about this process and tries to identify the colors that are part of it. In this case, the colors of nothing, of that shimmering nothing that marks a change of state, just like in the paintings of Luigi Grossi, an artist striving to capture the ineffable and to give presence and color to the sensations that make us human.

«Can the Colors of nothing be painted? Certainly, a painting of nothing does not exist; it would be pure nothing of a painting, a simple zero» – L. Grossi, I colori del nulla (The Colors of Nothing), Edizioni Pro Art, 2003

Federico Cina Fall Winter 2024 collection Colors of Nothing establishes a dialogue with brutalist architecture, it reflects on the uselessness of decoration with Adolf Loos, shares the transformative visions of Bill Viola, and breathes the sense of the classical of Salvatore Settis. With the aforementioned influences in mind, Colors of Nothing aims to narrate that exact moment when everything changes.

Continue to talk about details of Federico Cina Fall Winter 2024, therefore, it pursues the essence of form. The foundations of the wardrobe are sifted through by the centripetal force of cleanliness and the clean cut of a tailoring coldness. The lines are straight and precise, the cuts still vivid. A renewed geometric rigor outlines the silhouettes. Jackets and coats, rigid in construction, become the iron structure of a narrative of a body that undresses itself, wearing only the essential.

The folds imprint themselves on fabrics with a compact weave as if they were concrete. The palette tells a story of stone and fog, of winter drowsily cut by colors that become an emotional search in the rigidity of a construction process. Finding anew its Muse in the classic, the idea of being inspired by a symbol of tradition is born, which becomes an object, an accessory with a soft but sculptural structure, the Tortellino bag.

Colors of Nothing embraces completely the transformative act, the evolution, the moment when one accepts the change and makes it their own: we reach the other side and find new strength thanks to that vulnerability. Skeleton and structure represent building oneself from the inside, becoming the supporting column of oneself.