Uma Wang FW24
Memorabilia
The quest for less as a stream of memories.
Reminiscences. Of shapes, lines, volumes. The frame of the body, softly impressed on pillows.
The apparent severity that comes from remembrance of something distant, in space or time. Details are erased: what remains is the outline.
Silhouettes fall straight and vertically, with a certain bulk. Forms are constructed around the body, precisely tailored, wrapped and knotted to create structure or encase movement.
Structure as posture. Posture as manner. Manner as structure. Structure as a barrier, too: a way to contain the transitory, to avoid memories from being dispersed, and allow them to occupy space.
Drapes are solidified, in an attempt to turn the ephemeral into the permanent, like noting down thoughts on paper.
Fabric with weight. Dry. With a washed hand. Shaggy.
Strictness that contains and liberates, memorably.
As clearly pointed out by the poem that Angelo Flaccavento appositely wrote for the Uma Wang FW24 Collection, memories are more a question of shapes, volumes and textures rather than details. What gets lost in memories can still be preserved as an encased movement, as a structure that can save a posture, a transitory occupancy of space and time: traces of traces that amount to a silhouette, an uncertain feeling that outlines an absence made present.
The verticality of the silhouettes that graced the runway is interrupted by bumps that remind us of the uncertain path that every form of remembrance embarks on, a migration that erases every memory. Forms constructed around the body are open to various symbolic interpretations that allow the viewer and the wearer to establish a renewed and at the same time pregnant-of-inheritance relationship with the garments. In particular, a few looks resembled pillows turned into armored streams of immemorial nostalgia; a showcase of memories that don’t belong only to the individual but to humanity as such.
The draping becomes petrified and yet vivid, solidified and restless like an ephemeral remembrance turned into an eternal longing.
Shades of brown, red, bronze and gold indicate an earthly return to what feeds our unplaceable future: the flows of memories that surround us, encapsulate us and sustain our feet.
UMA WANG
Images by SULPAN AKNAZAROVA
Poem by ANGELO FLACCAVENTO
Words by DAVIDE ANDREATTA
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