Paolo Carzana was shooting the collection he’s named Il Risotto in his studio in London last week. “It’s a cookbook, not a lookbook, really,” he smiled broadly. “Everything here is hand-dyed organically. I’ll show you the kitchen later!”
There were just days to go before his unmistakable fragile bias-cut dresses, signature ‘Open Heart’ shirts, and pieced-together tie-fastened trousers were due to be served up at Dover Street Market’s seven stores. Each piece has been delivered with a label hand-written by the designer in the style of a waiter’s order taken in a restaurant. In ordinary fashion parlance, it’s a ‘see-now, buy-now’ collection, dished up to DSM’s customers in London, Paris, New York, LA and Tokyo.
Carzana was on set busy arranging a tiered “tomato” dress for Joseph Rigby’s camera while his collaborator Nasir Mazhar gently manipulated a matching scarf into a face-framing headdress. “The whole idea came from my auntie teaching me how to make a risotto when I was a child,” he related between takes. “She always spoke to me about it representing cucina povera, which is [Italian for] poor food. The beauty of it is utilizing what you had around you, in the village. Making a standard dish special, depending on what you could get your hands on. I feel it really resonates with what I do with my work: not having everything at my disposal, but feeling l create everything with my hands and with the people around me, and utilizing what we have.”
He offered each store its own ‘recipe,’ flavored with its own choice of colors. His rice ‘Risotto’ base, he explained, is the undyed raw-edged cloth—the cotton, peace silk, and georgette that are the signature sustainable materials he uses each season. He’d dyed up a swatch ‘menu’ for the buyers to order from. Dover Street in Paris perused it and chose a mixture of lemon, cavolo viola, walnut. London picked tomato, squid ink, and butter. New York ordered butter, prosciutto, saffron, and gorgonzola. Los Angeles chose butter, gorgonzola, mushroom, and squid ink. And so on. “It took an enormous amount of trust from DSM,” he said. “They’ve been amazing.”
In his imagination, the male models in his ‘cookbook’ are waiters. “And they’re serving one amazing woman, who is my auntie.” Carzana was born in Cardiff to a Welsh mother and a father whose family roots are in the Piedmonte region of northern Italy. “My grandfather was the first to come to England. He eventually became head waiter at the Cafe Royal in London. I’m obsessed by this distance between fantasy and reality.”
At this point in the family story, Carzana was clattering up the stairs of his studio to show off his kitchen. Huge chrome industrial cooking pots containing his long labored-over natural dye stuffs lined the stove and counter-tops. “This place used to be a school, so this is where they cooked the children’s lunches,” he grinned. “It’s the perfect place for me.”
Marinated over seven collections since he was a 19-year-old student at Westminster University driven to prove that ethical and sustainable methods can make beautiful heartfelt fashion, it’s plain that Carzana’s expertise is as sophisticated and mysterious-sounding ) as the hand of any master chef. He talked of “mordanting” fabric in citric acid, or vinegar, “which can completely alter saffron, for example, it can shift the shade from purple to pink. And then there are the different fibers, and how they react to color—like the indigo, which is the blue of the ‘gorgonzola’ hat in the photo. But then”, he added, “it’s always also about changing it and evolving.”
As his team began packing up orders bound for three continents, Carzana took a breath to think about how far he’s come. The struggle not to break his principles has been real, though always helped by serial support in London in the form of scholarships and NEW GEN grants from the BFC, and free studio space from Sarabande and the Paul Smith Foundation. Now he’s on his own two feet, delivering his biggest production run ever to one of the world’s greatest retail believers in creative designers. “This is a personal moment in my life that is joyful,” he said. “I’ve never felt happier.”
