PORN COUTURE | Interview with Matteo Carlomusto

MATTEO CARLOMUSTO, a brand founded by the 27-year-old Florence-based designer of the same name, has been working in Fashion since 2017. 

Dramatism, eroticism and transformism are characteristics at the base of the brand, considered controversial due to its explicit communication and its personal obsession with black and the dark image it gives to its work. He is one of the emerging Italian designers who tend towards an evocative but avant-garde and provocative product.

Photographer: Enrico Berni

Models: PANTHERA, LA PIAF

How was “Matteo Carlomusto” born?

In 2015, I graduated as a Fashion Designer at the Accademia Italiana in Florence and I immediately started working as a stylist and designer at some style offices and magazines in the industry, between Tuscany, Paris and Berlin.

It wasn’t until 2017, at the age of 24, driven by a very strong urgency and desire to show people my personal aesthetic code within Fashion, that I decided to embark on a career as an independent designer. Debuting with the first official collection at Berghain for Berlin Alternative Fashion Week, it brought a restyling of the diploma collection, expanded and readjusted for a total product of 16 looks.

The same collection was presented a week later at an event for emerging designers in Brno, Czech Republic. From there I continued to work on one collection a year, presenting subsequent work in the Netherlands for the Fashion Clash Festival in 2018 and again in the Czech Republic in 2019.  

The brand does not yet have a proper online shop. I currently work a lot with custom looks for international artists, such as Brooke Candy, Aquaria and for artists from the Italian music scene.

Your latest collection is called porn couture, and it’s a perfect blend between fetish culture and made in Italy. What’s the idea behind it?

PORN COUTURE is the new manifesto that bears my name. I see it more as a project than a collection. 

This period led me to realise that garments need more time to be appreciated and deserve to have a longer life than just a season that creates hype for the first few days of its run. Since it was impossible to create a show in which to present them, I decided to divide it into drops that are presented each time through magazines and social channels.

The name PORN COUTURE comes from my strong interest in the art of porn and fetish aesthetics, drawing from the kink and homo-erotic universe, from the leather community of the Tom of Finland days, from the drag scene and the aesthetics of pin-ups and burlesque performers of the past years.

I have a strong need to exalt and venerate the beauty of the naked body, especially those areas of the body that are still taboo for many, how can I do this through clothes? So I chose to design garments in which I could emphasise the nudity of intimate parts, building clothes around them that would somehow enhance them, like a frame. 

My designs are entirely made in Italy because they are designed, engineered and produced in Italy in my studio and workshop in Florence. But they tend to have an interpretation that can be read anywhere in the world, also because of the various inspirations through which they come to life.

Your fashion is often very political and controversial, meaning your collections are charged with the symbolism of protest. What do you fight for?

I think that through our work it is beautiful to send a message and this often turns out to be a protest because the society we live in is not yet fully ready for the freedom that many of us are fighting for. The protest arises at the moment when a sector can be considered attackable and criticizable. I think that fashion, as well as being a language of expression, is also an excellent means of communication to fight the many scourges still present in our country.

I like to fight for freedom and this is why in my past collections I have talked about religion, sexuality and taboos. 

In the first collections, I touched on taboo subjects such as the symbolism of the ‘burqa’ in Islamic culture, revisiting it in a menswear key and transforming it into a clear visual provocation that attacks Middle Eastern patriarchy, subjecting the male to the prison that it has constructed. I mixed this theme with the provocative image of ‘apparently’ feminine fetish clothes worn by men. Both concepts were a protest against the various stereotypes of society and the cultural impositions of religion. 

In the latest collection, I try to give normality to our bodies in their entirety, without dividing the body into partq to show and parts to hide, because I find that sad and meaningless. I think this spirit is a bit at the base of the queer ideology, which my clothes have always had a strong imprint of.

How do fashion and porn connect? How have you explored this connection in your work?

In my work, there is more eroticism than pornography. But I still find a strong connection between both things in fashion.

Aesthetically speaking, I can consider my clothes more erotic for the image they have, but their purpose is more related to porn and everything that can be considered fetish in porn because I would like my clothes to become a fetish for those who want them, just as in our sexuality we fetishize the image of the penis, breasts, vagina or butt: an object that we worship.

I explored this connection because of what I, as a person, have always loved about fashion, which is the obsession with an object that you repeatedly see, desire and finally buy.