Fabio Quaranta and Urania: the archive that de-archives

Fashion designer Fabio Quaranta welcomes us into his showroom–studio–event space in the south of Milan, a couple of streets behind the Prada Foundation, a part of the city in rapid transformation where derelict spaces and shuttered businesses sit alongside buildings being renovated or under construction. Opposite stands the newly repainted headquarters of the Lombardy Group of the Italian Relief Corps of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

“What I’m presenting on this occasion isn’t a Spring/Summer 2027 collection; I call it an edition, because we want to present our work when we’re ready – perhaps not every season, but at different moments, without being tied to gender,” Quaranta tells FashionNetwork.com.

He won the “Who’s On Next” competition in 2010 and, alongside his brand, lectures in Fashion Design at IUAV in Venice and teaches at NABA.

“The main reference for this edition I’m showing in Milan is the overall – the workwear coverall – which, through a shift in materials, is no longer conceived for manual labour but for intellectual or administrative work. For me, this is the new business suit. My theme is therefore a new proposal for a formal suit for a businessman.”

Quaranta takes us on a tour of his multidisciplinary project, which brings together fashion, art, design and music, called Urania.

“I’ve been pursuing it for six years now; it stems from my archive. I’m a designer from the generation that copied others’ references. For me, workwear, the military and Roman tailoring are essential points of reference; I couldn’t do this job as I do today if I hadn’t been influenced by these three macro-worlds,” he explains.

“And so we, the ones who ‘steal’, have always collected references – in my case, from a Sartoria Caraceni jacket to military overalls. So what do we do? We take these references and mix them together, don’t we? That’s what postmodernism taught us! We’re not the only designers who do it, but creatives – as they’re called today – do just that. You just have to say so,” Quaranta adds.

“I teach at university and at the academy, and these are the foundations of my lectures: ‘Don’t be afraid to show them – we all have references (of course, you have to study to be clear about them…), so let’s make them explicit,’” he continues.

“Naturally, we try not to copy, but to rework them with something of our own. This opens up a huge topic, because if I wanted to copy something I have in my archive, I couldn’t do it: I’d never find the same fabric, nor the same sewing machine that was used to make it. When I trace the pattern, however, I have some leeway, and it’s precisely in that space that creativity lies. We can work with that. After all, Picasso said, ‘I don’t copy, I steal’. Cubism emerged by borrowing from Hyperrealism. It’s a very multifaceted and delicate field, yet just as interesting,” says Quaranta, who opposes what he calls “the rhetoric of upcycling” – the idea that “you have to do something to a garment to make it your own, to make it precious. Usually they embroider something onto a second-hand piece and say, ‘This is ours’. I say exactly the opposite: I don’t do anything to the garment; on the contrary, I look after it – I mend it, I perfume it, I give it beautiful packaging – because for me a Giorgio Armani jacket and an early-20th-century jacket have equal standing. With Urania, we restore dignity and life to garments that had been forgotten, so it’s the exact opposite of archiving (another rhetoric – everyone’s archiving these days…). Urania is an archive that de-archives!”

At his headquarters in Via Privata Passo Pordoi, Quaranta also runs a school, Motelsalieri (ß), “a free, independent school of fashion and non-creative practices, where we have partially reinvented the code of teaching,” says the designer.

“When there are no lessons or presentations, we use the headquarters’ spaces for workshops and concerts.”

In the Urania exhibition featuring the capsule of jockey caps, on the upper floor of the designer’s headquarters, the garments were laid out horizontally because “they seek verticality; they seek bodies. Fashion changes meaning the moment you change the body that wears it. I feel like a designer when I propose something that already exists and put it on a different body,” emphasises  Quaranta, who has recently resumed distributing his work through prestigious venues such as Dover Street Market in Ginza, Japan, which, from the third week of October, will host an installation centred on his overalls, along with other high-end, cutting-edge boutiques: MdE in Rome (formerly Massimo degli Effetti), Frida in Frankfurt, Project 314 in Moscow, two further shops in Tokyo and one in South Korea. The brand’s e-shop has also returned.

“We weren’t betting on it, but now, with these selected products I’m offering – which aren’t bound by size or seasonality – we’re investing again to relaunch it.”

“Because I’m very small, I can manage these moments of global crisis better. In fact, I scaled back just as the crises began, because I’ve been doing this job since 2011; I’ve experienced all the ups and downs of that period and those that followed first-hand. I must say that presenting specific projects with loyal clients helps me take things one step at a time and avoid overexposing myself, because I’m independent in every sense,” concludes Quaranta, who once showed at Altaroma, at Santo Spirito in Sassia, and organised his most recent show with Urania at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, the perfect venue for his project, which straddles performance, art and design.

“I am a designer, and I want to defend my profession,” he adds.