Directed by Andrea Lamedica
Original Music Davide Marilungo
Photography Andrea Lamedica
Stylist Priscilla Cafaggi
Words Carolina Davalli
Model Teti Mar @ Independent Management
Hair Jonatan Eric Estrada
Make up Giorgia Giommoni
Stylist assistant Benedetta De Martino
Editor-in-chief Valentina Ilardi
Heritage is a GREY project that gives voice to the far-sighted fashion generation of designers and emerging brands that are establishing themselves in the contemporary scene.
For the #5 edition of Heritage, we are proudly presenting HG / LF, the independent, aseasonal and interdisciplinary brand founded in 2019 by Italian designers Letizia and Lorenzo. Since the uncovering of “heal your wounds”, their first collection presented in Milan for SS21, the creative duo has continued its quest into the realm of human intimacy, investigating the depths and abysses of experience in contemporary life. By channeling a sense of discomfort and disquiet through their artistic practice, the designers question the status quo of today’s existence, revealing the sick dynamics that regulate a hostile and unwelcoming world, ultimately governed by phagocytizing distractions and false myths.
With its recent collection “Creature Simili”, the duo takes this search for truth a step further, imagining a “pulverized society” whose particles gravitate towards a common dimension of otherness. Through the collection, HG / LF not only strive for authenticity, but also becomes a celebration of the transformative power of fashion for those who are brave enough to face the inconsistencies of the self and spit the sweetened pills of a corrupt reality. In “Creature Simili”, fractures expose pulsing gorges of creativity, slashes reveal forgotten traumas, clothes become the purest lenses for looking straight into oneself. After the presentation of the collection during Milan Fashion Week SS23, we asked Lorenzo and Letizia to tell us more about their creative process and long lasting inspirations.
“Wearable armours, protective structures that shield the most vulnerable parts of the body.” This is how you describe your pieces. From what or who does HG / LF clothing protect the wearer?
From slaughtered meat, from the disciplined people that walk on beaten paths and settle for the lesser, without having any control over their lives. Sometimes we wonder if ours is just an illusion, but we really feel powerful enough to react to this collective blindness.
Your brand’s claim is to design a visual representation of malaise. What do you find in the emotions of discomfort and turmoil that drive and fuel your practice?
“Modern civilization tends to deal just with the brighter sides of existence, ignoring all that is obscure. The crushing progress in science and technology misleads us into thinking that the world is orderly, polished, just as we wish it were, ultimately detaching us from all that is unclear and chaotic. Death, diseases, and the Evil are considered as mere mishaps and not as fundamental features of human existence. Also the art form of the tragedy, that historically obliged people to face traumatic truths, has been phagocytized by showbiz, which strives for the opposite: to distract from one’s inner self. Modern men and women live head down and not for fear of God, but for the terror of facing the abyss. This repressed trauma resurfaces more and more often and manifests itself in the most disparate ways: through the feeling of inadequacy, depression, panic attacks, addictions. Certain of fleeing from death we ultimately fled life, sentencing ourselves to unbearable unhappiness masked as wellbeing” – Niccolò Contessa
Where do you find your inspiration?
For us, creation blossoms from imperfection, from both effort and frustration, from the desire to transcend self-isolation and the research for “spiritual communion”. Most of what we perceive is intangible and can’t be described by words. Despite this, when we try to communicate with one another we strive to understand and to be understood, we enter this transitory phase of profound communion. This is what inspires us, and what we ultimately aim for.
“Creature Simili” (“Similar Creatures”, T.d.A) is the name of your latest project. What unites the creatures–aka the community–that gravitate around the brand?
What unites us is the idea of inhabiting, reacting and understanding the mechanisms of the system. We resist the forces that push us to conform, the repressive and seductive dynamics that regulate the world. We try to find a route where there aren’t.
How and to what extent does the underground scene influence the brand’s aesthetic?
Brightness and darkness, over and under: the system tries to define and label everything, therefore we do not intend to define ourselves or others. We intend to position ourselves in the midst of it all, everyday, between brightness and darkness. As underground culture teaches, that is where the most intense and radical things happen.
You presented “Creature Simili” through a multidisciplinary event, mixing poetry, editorial projects, illustration, performance, and sound. What did you seek in the encounter between disciplines and what did you actually find?
Interdisciplinarity is essential for us. We find it impossible to follow a single practice. Our work is contaminated by multiple means of expression that we adopt to represent our inner world in the most complete and heterogeneous way.
Describe your work just using movies, books and records’ titles.
A book: “Creature simili” by AgenziaX. An album: “Canzoni da spiaggia deturpata” by Le luci della centrale elettrica. And three movies: “Waking life” by Richard Linklater, “Jubilee” by Derek Jarman and “The holy mountain” by Alejandro Jodorowsky.
