Paolo Carzana Autumn/Winter 2025 at London Fashion Week

Paolo Carzana Autumn/Winter 2025 / AW25 at London Fashion Week entitled Dragons unwinged at the butchers block

Story of Paolo Carzana AW25 / Autumn/Winter 2025 collection :

I began cutting fabric on the 24th January for this collection. I deactivated my personal instagram account on January 1st, and allowed my mind a break from what seems to be an evolving platform to spread negativity and tear people apart. To begin the collection, was to finish the trilogy that I had started a year ago.

TRILOGY OF HOPE, Melanchronic Mountain was an emotional ascend upwards to the heavens, exploring earth as the element, greens. How to Attract Mosquitoes we jumped off the top of the mountain and fell down into the underworld of hell, underwater, blues and reflection.

This collection, Dragons Unwinged at the Butchers Block is now where we take flight into the middle, into purgatory. Fire being the element, oranges, pinks, purples and yellows. When thinking about what this collection could and should be if there was to be a great purpose to it, I understood that really there needed to be a change. A change in colour, in textile, in silhouette. I began by shifting the colour palette to one created entirely by hand, usually I work in a way of creating the garments and dunk dyeing them to achieve colour. This time around I worked once again with Toulouse Lautrec as a reference point on both silhouette and feeling, but most importantly on the delicacy of line and colour. I wanted to achieve a feeling that the clothes were dancing in colour. A 3-dimensional effect to the colour as opposed to something flat and block appearing. I hand draped, pattern cut, and manipulated fabric through pleating, ruching and padding, and hand applied the colour using different paint brush sizes, spraying and rolling. Since the collection was set in purgatory, a lot of endless spirals and circles made up some of the patterns, drape and textiles.

I worked with logwood, Turmeric, madder and cochineal to create a palette fit for purgatory. Being at the studio in smithfield at the Paul Smith’s foundation, one of the greatest things about working there through the night is that the butchers begin their work throughout the week and on the weekend fabric nightclub is alive. This tiny area never sleeps, and has made it an enjoyable experience to work through the night and keep feeling inspired and motivated, as you do not feel so alone. As a vegan, being around the butchers I have feelings that I would not expect, even though it is hard to understand what is happening, its true, two things can be true, because there you see a real community of working people and working tradition.

I thought about how dragons are the most beautiful and powerful creatures, and could never be at the mercy of man, but what we are seeing today is human’s destruction on our earth. I think about lgbtq rights worldwide, if we have our wings taken away from us, we cannot be ourselves. I also think about the scary rise in AI, and wonder what may come about, is it possible that through this change, we will unknowingly be clipping our own wings, destroying our own intelligence and losing our human approach and hand and heart that makes up our creative body. I knew when I visited the Holy Tavern pub 5 minutes from my studio that this was the place to create purgatory. A pub has historically been a place for working people to go and drown their sorrows but also celebrate in camaraderie, and it was this double meaning that made it so special to me.

I believe with this collection, I arrived at a place of acceptance, with this endless circle of going up and down, in and out, through the emotions, positive and negative, pain and happiness. I was asked to answer a question on what it is like to struggle as a designer in london through a person I have never met and knows nothing about me. To me, I take this and say, whatever struggle I may or may not face as a designer is mine to have. It is my choice to do this, because I feel that I have something to say and a purpose in what I do. I have received the most incredible support from so many places. Newgen, that has changed my life, Sarabande Foundation and now Paul Smith’s Foundation. And I feel a huge amount of gratitude, I am incredibly lucky to have been able to share my work with the industry and to people I have so much respect for. Laura Holmes and Adam Iezzi and my whole creative team, and mentors and supporters that have really changed my feeling towards working. What I mean by this is that, when I started, I just wanted to create work, now I feel that, with the support I have, I want to make all the people who work with me, proud and that their contribution and support has been worth it.

One hope moving forward is that, we as a generation, change the meaning of the word “commercial”, because to me commercial is not making something that goes into landfill and never leaves the planet even though it has been disposed of. What it is about is creating and owning a piece or something that would be kept, worn and loved forever, the economic value in that is huge, and much more “commercial” to me. So, that is something I need to do.

Words by Paolo Carzana