LONGFORM 3

A NEWSLETTER FROM ANDREA BATILLA

THE LOST LANGUAGE OF FASHION

This is an article published in Il Post, part of an ongoing reflection on the idea of independent thinking in fashion.

I arrived in Milan around October 1986 and for a few months slept in a small, bare room at the Sacro Cuore boarding house, founded—no less—by Don Giussani, the figure behind Communion and Liberation. At the time, I was attending both a European Languages degree at the Università Statale and a Fashion Design course at Istituto Marangoni. Every morning, I walked a long stretch from Via Rombon 78, practically outside the city, to the Lambrate metro stop. It was nearly two kilometers along a busy road, in a bitterly cold winter, in a Milan I felt completely alien to—coming as I did from small towns where a two-kilometer walk would land you in another city.

On the long weekend train rides between Milan and Viareggio, with non-reservable seats and over four hours of travel, I read. I read so much during that time that I can’t remember many of the books, even though I know I held them in my hands for hours with the clatter of the tracks in the background.

When I read The Lost Language of Cranes, a 1986 novel by David Leavitt about a New York teenager’s struggle to come out, I was 19. I felt the mix of excitement and terror at belonging to a culturally and sexually liberated community that was dying en masse from AIDS. And I felt alone—very alone.

In the novel, one character tells a disturbing story, which gives the book its title. A child left in a playpen for long periods by neglectful parents develops a strange, mechanical, seemingly incomprehensible form of communication, abandoning spoken language altogether. Social workers discover that the child had been imitating the movements of a giant crane—the only thing visible from his window—essentially identifying it as his mother.

This extraordinary image is a metaphor for the abandonment many of us felt, but also for the immense power, born of horror, to create new languages—or perhaps to reconstruct lost ones. I say this because I believe pain and frustration are incredible fuel for imagination. Not the only fuel, but among the most powerful. And because I believe that connection has been broken today.

When I began to study fashion—and later work in it—I realized I could use it as a tool to interpret the world, but also as a refuge, a weapon, a kind of magic wand. In the ’90s, the world was more legible because it was more polarized; there wasn’t such deep intermingling of mainstream and independent thought. Confrontations happened in the streets, not in front of screens, and clothing was a vital form of self-expression—a path to social recognition, to acceptance or rejection.

On the streets, you could clearly distinguish a goth from a preppy, someone from San Siro from someone from the Navigli, a right-winger from a leftist, a gay person from a straight person, someone inside or outside the system. It was easier to exist, but harder to be young, because there was little room for compromise—or so I believed at the time.

My days passed immersed in the films of Marguerite Duras, the experimental theater of Raffaello Sanzio, underground clubs like Primo Piano or Plastic, driving to Marrakech for vacation or spending New Year’s Eve in a half-empty pub in Trieste with a couple of sex workers and my best friend. All to escape dominant thought, the sanitized, comforting daily norms of those watching Domenica In.

Hard as it may be to believe today, fashion back then was deeply divided into two opposing camps that didn’t just avoid each other—they despised each other.

The world had quickly fallen for the comforting classicism of Armani or the glam of Versace. But precisely to escape this suffocating embrace, resistance cells had formed—in Paris, London, New York, and even Milan. A radical, intellectual approach—until then reserved for music and art—entered fashion. New designers followed alternative paths to tell stories about a world many found repulsive, one no longer represented by the flamboyant, meaningless shows of Saint Laurent or Dior at the time.

Alternative, dark, introspective visions by Romeo Gigli, Comme des Garçons’ Japanese designers, and later Martin Margiela, Raf Simons, Alexander McQueen, and John Galliano offered a different perspective. They made fashion address pain, frustration, social unrest, violence—and sometimes even death. For these brilliant designers, fashion was a way to tell unpleasant truths, building close emotional relationships with their customers—a community, in today’s terms. These talents didn’t just make clothes. They mined the world for its contradictions and created liberating languages that are still in use. It was very close to what we now call activism, though it was carried out in very different ways—and it no longer exists in fashion.

There was no commercial intent, no nostalgic vision, no desire to please—only a clear desire to explore new territories and make them known, meaningful, important, even if two minutes earlier they seemed unacceptable.

Two essential examples mark the divide between dominant thinking and avant-garde movements—and could offer today’s fashion profiteers a moment of reflection.

If you search “Romeo Gigli Fall/Winter 1990-91” on YouTube, you’ll instead find the full show of Fall/Winter 1988/89, presented in 1987. It runs 25 minutes—an unthinkable length today—but it’s worth watching in full. First, to observe how the fashion editors were dressed compared to the runway pieces—the puffed hair and heavy shoulder pads now look comically out of place. But more importantly, you’ll notice a minimalist, pure, radical language that hasn’t aged and now dominates collections from brands like The Row and Loro Piana.

That set of signs—so divisive at the time—marked a profound change in how people dressed globally because it conveyed discomfort, an expression of opposition.

The legendary journalist Natalia Aspesi wrote the following in La Repubblica on March 14, 1987:

"Romeo Gigli, 37 years old, affectionately dubbed a shy violet for his gruff lack of showmanship. His favorite models, 14-year-old girls who display bewilderment, fragility, and poorly treated scoliosis, no longer seem like victims of brutalization, but rather like they're walking—wrapped in their twisted rags—toward execution: dressed like Luisa Sanfelice in prison, in a long, hip-bulging wool skirt the color of a damp cell, or like Anne Boleyn stripped of gold and satin, clad instead in a mortifying yet exciting little black dress clinging to her flat body, neck poking out from a tiny black lace ruffle. The new star of mortification, beloved by young billionaires who dislike haute couture and middle-aged photographers eager to intellectualize at least through clothes, has also found success designing the Callaghan collection."

A review like that would be impossible today for many reasons. The main one isn’t the sexual violence reference or the body shaming, but the direct, biting critique with no room for redemption—a public execution on paper. That kind of desperate opposition no longer exists because the interests of media and brands are now so entangled that true criticism has vanished. But also because designers no longer take radical stances. Sealed in luxury studios with multimillion-dollar paychecks, they have everything to lose if they ever truly spoke out. Natalia Aspesi faced multiple attacks and was ultimately removed from her role as fashion critic—publishers were terrified she’d alienate La Repubblica’s wealthy advertisers. The level of conflict faded—and then disappeared.

The second story takes place in France. The 20th arrondissement, on the eastern edge of Paris, includes Belleville—Daniel Pennac’s neighborhood—and was one of the city’s most diverse and, at the time, roughest areas. In 1989, when Martin Margiela chose to stage his third collection (Spring/Summer 1990), no designer had ever dared go so far from the city center or the cozy 18th-century grandeur of the 1st arrondissement.

Margiela’s clothes were nearly incomprehensible to most. Torn, dirty, chaotic, seemingly unstructured, his designs looked like a haphazard mashup of styles. His shows—stark, with non-professional models in nihilistic locations—were the complete opposite of mainstream runway glamor.

While scouting, Margiela found a playground in Belleville. But when he arrived, the local children—mostly of North African or African descent—asked him where they’d play if he took over their only fun spot. So he invited them to the show. He had them sit on the ground—an act of welcome rare in fashion. And then something magical happened: the children invaded the runway. They walked with the models, held their hands, climbed on their backs. The reality of the suburbs disrupted the rigid ritual of the fashion show—in a positive, destabilizing way. It was a punk gesture that would revolutionize fashion, building an alternate language that many hated—myself included, as I still worked for Gigli, who had in some ways inspired Margiela but was now rendered obsolete by him.

What remains of these two now-distant stories are aesthetic references scattered across modern runways. But their explosive power—born of pain, built without commercial constraints—is nowhere to be found.

If we’re feeling nostalgic, we might say that was a romantically creative era. But the truth is that, back then, fashion could still reflect societal shifts with deep symbolic meaning, unafraid of the consequences.

Today, this still happens—rarely—in the work of designers like Luca Magliano, Rick Owens, or recently, John Galliano for Maison Margiela. But for the most part, the horizon—especially for young designers—is limited to commercial success, survival, and the collective hallucination of celebrity approval.

Maybe it’s time to reexamine fashion’s darker side—to absorb its cold, loneliness, and shadow without sanitizing the message for mass consumption. Messages and languages that aim to drive change must be indigestible at first—they must hurt. Only then, over time, can they become common narrative, having absorbed the revolutionary impulse and, in some way, changed the world.