George Pistachio
Early in my preview of Paolo Carzana’s latest collection, on the morning of his Spring/Summer 2027 runway show, I ask what the painted masks covering some of his models’ faces represent. “I don’t want to explain what things mean,” he says. “I want you to decide what they mean to you.”
Carzana will however talk expansively about cloth, the sun or a daffodil, but retreat when asked to force any of it into a quotable metaphor. He is doing all this while clutching a broken rib, sustained two weeks earlier in an accident apparently too boring to recount, and running on around ten minutes’ sleep. Yet he recites the show’s not-very-catchy title without hesitation: Why Wait Until Wednesday, the Holy Wine Is Bleeding and the Colours of the Carrots Are Changing, I’ll Still Be Your Prince of Pain, Until Man Colours the Rain. “I had that title right at the beginning,” he says with a strained laugh, “so I pre-empted all this pain.”
The Welsh designer is the son of a builder, which feeds directly into how he thinks about making. “Creativity exists in people’s hands far beyond what we call the creative world,” he says. Builders, carpenters and blacksmiths became touchstones for t...