Bianca e Blu Monica Bolzoni

“The object of design is the human body”: these words open Italian designer Monica Bolzoni’s “Manifesto”, where she described the concept of “fashion design” to her students at IUAV in Venice. Focusing on the body is very unusual among fashion creators of our time: every kind of body, not only the standard measurements of a fashion model, a human body, not a fetish, a body free of its choices, not constricted by fashion rules. It is not simple to conceive clothes and accessories as eternal pieces, modular through time, not bound to the frenzy of short fashion seasons. Walter Benjamin said that “each generation experiences the fashions of the one immediately preceding it as the most radical antiaphrodisiac imaginable” (Benjamin 1999, 79); in opposition to this statement Monica Bolzoni creates timeless clothing, “affection pieces” that can interpret time as a story of people and bodies nonetheless.