Vogue Italia, the new 100% real people issue

“Where does fashion live?” the cover of Vogue Italia in July 1998 and at the time the answer was evident because that creative and productive system had then reached perhaps the highest point of its parable. Where fashion lives today is instead a less obvious question: this is why Vogue Italia has decided to try to answer it in the new issue on newsstands from February 5th.

Exactly one year after the outbreak of the pandemic, the editorial staff of the magazine went to look for it the places and stories of those who today continue to believe in the future of a sector that has gone through months of enormous difficulties, which have seen transformations already underway accelerate and new promising ideas emerge.

The result is a journey that does not so much tell the creative gesture, but rather the moment in which the clothes have already taken shape, and then they represent themselves, and then meet the public’s judgment.

We therefore speak of fashion shows, the subject of a profound transformation and dematerialization, of the boom of fashion videos, of new unexpected digital spaces destined for many (such as the business of videogame outfits) or for a few (the boom of micro-communities), of stores that by definition have the pulse of consumer priorities, of new geographical perspectives. Above all we talk about the street: the place where and for which fashion was born.

Exceptionally, in this issue’s extensive fashion portfolio there are no models or images produced by professional photographers. In fact, twenty-five stylists, among the most relevant in the world, were asked to choose and shoot ordinary people themselves who according to them embody the style of the moment. So there are sisters, mothers, daughters, old friends, queens of the night, strangers met by chance on the beach, artists, musicians, creative directors, producers. Then again: directors, very young actresses, underground rappers, photographers and Milanese by birth or adoption, all between 20 and 30 years old. All people with their own deep-rooted sense of style, real and authentic.

Like the two protagonists of the covers, two very young Milanese girls who dream of a future in fashion: Lavinia, 23, an intern at Vogue Italia, and Meron, 27, a junior account at Giorgio Armani.

“As far as I know, it is the first time that an issue of Vogue has been produced without the contribution of professional photographers and without models: a small experiment that aims to represent reality in direct mode, with the fewest possible filters”, he writes in his editorial the director Emanuele Farneti. «And in a street in Milan, a few meters from our office, the covers were shot. They simply celebrate the dream of two girls who believe so much in the future of fashion that they plan to make it a job. I am convinced that in a world where, after all, what counts is the talent of the people and the ability to renew themselves, no indicator is worth more than the enthusiasm of those who have just started ».

“Rather than to feed the fantasy of fashion, this time we used our pages to feed the dream of its reality,” he says. Ferdinando Verderi Creative Director of Vogue Italia. “We have created a portfolio of images without mediations that directly connect our community of stylists to their muses: each was asked to photograph a person who is a source of inspiration for them to assemble and compose a sincere and unfiltered representation of what fashion really is. The result is a series of honest and direct portraits that bring the tradition of street style photography to the pages of Vogue Italia: this time it tells about the clothes, the wearer, and nothing else. From our lives to the magazine, and back to our lives. “