Giovanni Gastel uses the field of fashion for creative exercises which have their roots in other fields. He mixes styles and imagery in a peculiar combination of genres. Fabbrifashion is a persuasive example of the creative contamination which includes the work of the author himself, which he refers to with a refined and elegantly ironic style. Gastel uses the adjective “elegant” to describe his perspective. Elegance, it should be noted, is intended as a vision of the world, and as a moral rather than aesthetic value.
The artist interprets the iconography of metamorphosis, represented by art, from the Renaissance to Contemporary art. The metamorphoses of Savinio, the unusual combinations of Cecil Beaton, the doubling of images by Erwin Blumenfeld, and the imagery of Irving Penn inspire Gastel, who responds with balanced composition and expressive imagery. He constructs a parallel world of pure imagination and provides a symbolic interpretation of both the story of fashion and the company’s icon, the Amarena Fabbri. On the other hand, fashion itself is a system of signs and relationships. The spontaneity of the young model personifies a product that is always young. It is a poetic staged set. Fashion is made to be photographed, and later recreated and revisited in post-production. This new attribution of meaning focuses on the creative use of the artist’s archive and amplifies the opportunity offered by fashion to be interpreted in a thousand different ways, and with a thousand different identities.