Giorgio Natti Raineri uses fashion to heal, cure, and rethink masculinity

Fashion is an inherent part of Giorgio’s identity. He grew up in Padua, a small city in north east Italy, where, he recalls, most of the people at school’s parents worked in the fashion industry. Padua is known to be “one of the best cities in Italy and in the world” for fashion accessories. After leaving school, he moved to London to study menswear at London College of Fashion. However, the pandemic cut his studies short and he returned to Italy, where he finished his degree in fashion design at the Accademia Costume & Moda in Rome.

Giorgio says the Accademia’s small, family-like community allowed him to thrive. His tutors also struck the right balance of forming professional and personal relationships with students. “My professor was frank and direct, he’d say ‘You did a shitty job this time but it’s fine; tonight we’re all going to have an Aperitivo together.’” For Giorgio, the relationships he built at the Accademia were integral to his growth as a designer: “I don’t think I could do half of what I’ve done without the people around me.”

He speaks of his “radically different” experiences studying fashion in London and Rome. The main difference that struck him was that fashion education in the UK encourages more experimentation, while in Italy, the focus is on functionality. Giorgio recalls that, “If something was too creative [at the Accademia], we were always asked for designs that could be manufactured instead.”

“If something was too creative [at the Accademia], we were always asked for designs that could be manufactured instead.” – Giorgio Natti Raineri

In terms of influences, literature and cinema are the two biggest points of reference for Giorgio’s designs. His final collection was entitled “Riparando L’inevitabile Frattura” (Repairing the Inevitable Fracture), inspired by a quote from American psychologist and professor of gender studies Carol Gilligan. Following texts by Gilligan and Judith Butler, Giorgio questioned the social construct of gender: “It doesn’t really exist yet does exist in the reality of everyday life, so what can we do to make it better?”

The 2022 queer coming-of-age film Close by Lukas Dhont – which questions ideas around masculine stereotypes – and Luca Guadagnino’s 2020 television series We Are Who We Are – similarly informed his work. The designer also turned to the motif of flowers “[to combine] something really fragile together with masculinity” and the ancient Japanese art of “kintsugi”, in which broken ceramics are repaired with gold. The words of Louise Bourgeois – her statement that “art is a guarantee of sanity”, which she scrawled on some of her works – underlined Giorgio’s entire creative process.

Giorgio is struck by how masculinity is so often associated with violence and harm. Reflecting on the popular British short-hand term for a white tank top (the so-called “wife-beater” vest) he asks,  “Why do we have to give violent names to an inanimate object? I’d understand if it was a gun, but it is a piece of clothing.” Speaking to the complex socio-cultural layers that exist within this seemingly simple garment, he used the “wife-beater” as the basis of his collection, in which he embroidered hand-shaped flowers, stuck together by candle heat, onto the vest. Jeans were another garment integral to his collection, since he found they were often connected to Western gender ideals of macho masculinity and the cowboy archetype presented in American popular culture. Referencing the “kintsugi” art practice, he slashed the jeans and repaired them with small gold stitches.

“Why do we have to give violent names to an inanimate object? I’d understand if it was a gun, but it is a piece of clothing.” – Giorgio Natti Raineri

Giorgio’s graduate collection presents an eclectic and intricate approach, featuring halter neck tops, woven trousers, embroidered shorts, and mesh dresses, all skillfully layered for a captivating effect. The collection was a strong personal statement, and making it was an emotional and labour-intensive process. The flowers alone took 150 hours of work. “It was the idea of repairing this violence, the embroidery that took hundreds of hours was this idea of giving something time to heal.”

As our conversation comes to a close, we reflect on the challenges of the industry and the unhealthy expectations placed on young people to constantly move cities for jobs in fashion, which Giorgio adds “is an economic, emotional and psychological struggle.”

Working as an intern in illustration for Christian Dior Couture in Paris at the time of our conversation, Giorgio hopes to keep working in fashion for years to come, so as to pursue his wider goal in life: elicit an emotional response and move people.