Visionary New Designer Paolo Carzana Conjures A Magical World During London Fashion Week

After a year of lockdown, a youthful, astonishing wave of creative resilience is flowing back to meet the world. Today’s revelation was the 18 tender, visionary looks Paolo Carzana hand made, completely alone, in his studio in Cardiff, Wales, along with a film and a show he shot on his phone. “It’s really me creating what I don’t see,” he said. “Characters I imagine walking around protecting me.”

Carzana’s realm—Another World, he calls it—is a conjuring of spiritual healing, romantic, analog fantasy and a rootedness in craft, nature, and the hinterland of Welsh fairy mythologies: “I wanted to do things that have a delicate and fragile relation to the body,” he said. “It’s the idea that there’s an alternative way to do things, and an alternative world to exist in against the rise of fake, false, curated online reality and purposeless actions. Even though the country and the world is divided,” he said. “I wanted to show that we, who share the same beliefs, can be the antidote.”

Emerging at the end of the rollercoaster of anxiety and fear that has hit all students and graduates forced home during the pandemic, Carzana’s highly original visualization of a completely self-imagined speculative place of solace—hand-sewn exclusively with materials he’d collected and dyed with natural pigments—is a debut that places him as an isolated leader-hero of Gen Z’s fiercely sensitive values. Not to mention, a wonder to the fashion world at large.

Insider eyes have been on Carzana’s outlier talent—in ways that are bound to draw comparisons to Alexander McQueen or John Galliano in their student days—since he graduated from Westminster University with a BA in 2018, with a vastly dramatic, entirely vegan and organically-sourced collection, “The Boy You Stole.” After winning an MA scholarship to Central Saint Martins from Kering and the BFC on the strength of his quietly messianic dedication to inventing sustainable practices, he graduated in 2020. Then, like his peers the world over, he suddenly found himself back at home, thrown on his own resources.

Now, Carzana is part of this London Fashion Week’s digital showcase—but equally he’s living proof of the new-generation reality that not everything needs to happen in London, or within any fashion capital, for that matter. On a Zoom call from the low-rent studio he’s found on Cardiff’s docks—themselves a site of regional post-industrial regeneration—he explained, “I identify as Welsh, not British, through my mother’s family. I was born here in Cardiff, and it’s almost full circle. I found out that my grandpa did his apprenticeship in this building years ago.” He shot his collection in the Cardiff Coal Exchange, transforming models from a new local agency into “changelings from a fantasy world.”

From their fairy bonnets to their fabric ghillie slippers, everything was twisted and sculpted from bamboo silk, organic cotton, pineapple leather and antique Welsh tapestry blankets and quilts; materials saved up from Carzana’s years in school. Instead of zippers and buttons, he devised delicate systems of ribbons and knots for wearers to tie on trousers, underwear, dresses and jackets. “It’s very much molded around the body,” he said. A series of diaphanous “open heart” shirts, stretched to expose the chest, spoke of vulnerability—and seem likely to be an instant signature hit item. “I don’t want it to be, like, sexualized,” he said. “But it's an alternative way of feeling; feeling you’re in control of the garment.”

Carzana gestured behind him to the stove with the industrial pans in which he mixed up the natural dyes he’s been experimenting with since he was at Westminster. He used madder root, raspberries and strawberries to dye things pink to deep red; turmeric to make his greens and yellow-golds; logwood and lavender to turn things shades of purple. Infusions of lavender and rose oil, holy basil and witch hazel added elements he hopes will transfer healing properties. “It’s come from being vegan and eating organic, and wanting to do everything right,” he said. “I’ve been reading a book that has hundreds of medicinal plants, just going through and looking at things which have been used for centuries.”

Through the dark times, something incredible is emerging: a reformation, a regeneration from the hands of the youngest. Paolo Carzana represents that struggle into the light. “I really wanted to symbolize and have a memory book of this moment of just being on my own, and always be able to remember this period,” he said. “And trying to make a beautiful memory of it.”