This tale is inspired
by the latest Valentino spring-summer 2027 collection
Immense lives my soul has known. For consoled afflictions only the ephemeral are to be held responsible, pleasures branded as vanity by those who are afraid to look at themselves in the mirror. Whoever does not read dresses poorly. Poetry is the unit of measure of emotional ignorance, it is the most sensorial form of perception there is, it is the word that is human flesh wearing its finest clothes. Those who read know it: it is the book that calls. Expectation is a futile effort, a gesture of shameless presumption in believing it mastery to always hit upon the right read, when in truth the book reveals itself as a creature of luxury and grants itself only to those who pay for it with the rare currency of understanding. Have you ever thought about it? Trama is the word that names the plot of a novel as much as the weave of a fabric. A dress is composed of cerebral matter, a synaptic dialogue of visions and antipodal chromatisms of rainbows that trade places to elude the spectrum and cheat death.
The thread inlays itself in the unpredictability of an embroidery that could be a rose or a melancholy bellflower, perhaps a lily perhaps a primrose: in the end it is a mermaid’s tail. The feather is the relic of a fantastic zoology, in paradise fly birds that lay crystals upon the hems of sleeves that welcome them into their hollow, sheltered from bad taste. And we read, we read, we read, yet I wonder… How are they dressed, those who write, those who read, those who exist between the pages? I have a defect of form, I love beauty, and I seek it everywhere, in the carnelian hanging from a velvet ribbon, in the cross that is votive no longer because it desecrates itself in its sin of extreme vanity. But is it truly so? Is there perhaps bad faith in admiring the talents that an unspecified divinity has bestowed upon the writer and the designer? Imagine a chaise longue in antique rose brocade, its wooden frame whose gold is gently wearing away, and the rug strewn with the memory of a journey you would love to take again, but how many suitcases would you have to bring?
On the shelves you find the path
to Everland, fantasy is not false
merely because it is imagined. And absolutely, I will not wear
dreadful bedroom slippers with curlicues of childish tenderness, I
want satin and the feathered pouf
at the toe, like a dandelion clock so generous
that it scatters its splendor over soil it hopes will be fertile.
And for heaven’s sake, do not ask me to lend you a book: it
contains me, and I cannot part with myself. I can give it
to you, if you wish. That way you will know how much I love
you. What is life without love? I truly
do not know, because I still remember so well those silk
satin boots in an iridescent fuchsia,
like an amethyst made up for a party, I yearn for
them so deeply that I will run to them and take them home, I simply
cannot live without them. And that sash in acid
yellow, so perfect for my black
dresses?
Do not get me started on those beloved glass pearl necklaces which, like the pages of my biography, string upon a single thread every surrender to my dear temptations. What do I love most? My dear, pink, of course. As a bride or as a corpse, I shall enter the church in my color, dear even to the hour of passing, for it glazes that hour with irony like a savory petit four that hides a candied petal at its heart.
You already know whom I am speaking of, don’t you? Have you ever seen a train like that? The needless solemnity of those who glorify the practical. Come now, enough with thinking, have you perhaps forgotten that there are dreams? Do you truly believe they are useless? The fool is never the one who believes in them, but the one who mocks them. Ours would be an unadorned planet, if you were right about dreams. But then, you would read no more. And I would walk about naked.
