Middle earth is now

This article is published in number 38 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 21 September 2021

A week ago, during the Salone del Mobile in Milan, the Audi brand held a conference that saw as protagonists the director Gabriele Muccino, the Palm Angels stylist Francesco Ragazzi, the Audi Italia Brand Director Fabrizio Longo and Gabriele Key, one of the creative directors of Marcel Wanders studio. In their stories, the speakers talked about the revolutions taking place in cinema, in the world of electric cars and in the new dynamics of fashion and design.

Of the many visions, I cannot forget the words of the moderator of the evening, the journalist and former director of the Republic Mario Calabresi: “One day, perhaps in ten years”, Calabresi said, “we will look at these times saying” this happened before 2020 and this instead happened later “. That year was indeed a watershed, a point of no return, the beginning of a new era. For everything and for everyone ».

Last Sunday, then, a reader sent me an email. Her name is Gloria Brugnoli and in terms of revolutions, before and after 2020, she has quite clear ideas. “I am enthusiastic about these times and I am also happy to be there,” he writes. «I am an adult and like all adults I still have one foot in 1900 and I am still able to recognize, even in the fog, the path that our family has traced for us. But our children, with their globalized world, are ready to develop new paths. Middle earth is now. Of course, our children are disturbed, scared, perhaps alone. But they are also alive as they have never been before. And I like all of this. I like to see the passion with which everything happens, the uncertainties and contradictions that mark the march, the guys who guess but also those who fail, the women who win, the people who enrich themselves with the perseverance of an idea, LGBTQ + communities that assert themselves, the old reasons and the new reasons for which a couple chooses, those for which they separate, the evolutionary difficulties of each one, the useless violence, the silly anger, because everything is coming down, the hurricane is passing through here and we will never have the same things as before. And I’m so happy to be there ».

We have thought and continue to think of this newspaper as the reflection of this middle earth, of these before and after that push us back and forth, in a necessary future but full of questions and in a past that seems indispensable but from which, in some way, we must emancipate ourselves. In this regard, in this issue you will find those who are trying to write new chapters, to trace new paths. These are “only” some examples to indicate a possible direction, a necessary future. Because, we are convinced, we are living in a middle earth, a watershed of which we will say (in a few years and with hindsight) «first it happened in one way, then it would have happened in another very, very different».

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