When Antonio Tarantini spoke about his new collection, he revealed a poetic touch that is also reflected in his garments, which exude the beautiful feeling of free verse. The clothing he designs under the ATXV label celebrates the human body and preserves the hand of the maker.
Because Tarantini drapes directly onto a form or body, there is something physical about his process. He tells stories through the manipulation of fabrics and by cutting and applying layers that frame the body in unexpected ways. Take this season’s half-body suits, for example, like the black one worn under a long taupe sweater with rolled and twisted details. It is even more visible from the back, but the difference in weight and color between the materials provides both depth and flat surfaces; it is as if the lower layer finishes the ‘sentence’ started by the upper one.
Throughout his collection, Tarantin created many beautiful synchronicities. There was the relationship of fabrics with each other and with the skin, the latter achieved through layering, cutouts and transparencies, but also with nature and history. The starting point of the spring collection was the designer’s love for the night sky. “One of my passions, one of my favorite things in the world, is looking at the sky, especially in the summer when I’m at the beach in the evenings. I always look at the stars because I think there is so much beauty in the sky, and also because the constellations are full of history and stories,” the designer said during a phone call. “I looked at Andromeda, at Perseus, at all of mythology, and I tried to take a little piece of that beauty and bring it to Earth; to blend all these elements with those in the world we live in today.”
One of the things that today’s world seems to long for is an affirmation of humanity, of the physical state of being. How else can the predominance of sculptural and carved elements in the collections be explained? Presented with the enormous and uncontrollable power of nature, and the seemingly limitless reach and potential of technology, people can seem small. In ancient times, myths were a way to organize the world, to create a hierarchy, a way to understand forces greater than the people they affected.
