Carlotta Actis Barone’s designing style is always political in direction
and focused on true social matters. Her graduate collection featured 8
looks taking inspiration from the theme of Feminism, particularly the
suffragette movement from the beginning of last century. Her pieces are
directed at strong, feminine women that believe in a liberated female
condition and strive for gender freedom by paying attention to their
fascinating bodies and forms, which she learnt to appreciate profoundly
through her studies in figure drawing
Fashion Mode have teamed up with Carlotta for her new collection,
entitled “wear my skin” which aligns her political views and her designs.
This collection is based on the fight against racism, particularly on the
deportation of Africans to America before the 1865 civil war. This
collection has been designed to demonstrate the cruelty of those acts,
and attempts to translate the victims pain and suffering into something
that everyone can experience through wearing the clothes. The colour
palette is based on a range of skin colours from each human race,
allowing the exchange of shapes and colours to allow different races to
get into someone else’s skin.
In Carlotta’s words; turning rags, chains and scars into high-fashion
clothes allows the use of our bodies to communicate the shame from all
acts of racism either past or future
The collection features rich drapery and cuts inspired by the worn,
knotted and over-sized appearance of slave’s garb as they toiled in the
fields. The shoulders on the pieces become very wide and structured to
imitate strong, muscular shoulders and denim dungarees, typical work
clothes, are transformed and reinvented into oversized
trousers supported by braces, sliding down the hips and revealing parts
of the body previously hidden. The fabrics are humble simple shirt
cottons, like the cotton grown on the plantation fields. Femininity is
exalted as it emerges from the details of a man’s working shirt which
once enlarged, becomes a dress or top.The colour palette of the
collection is dominated by the shades of the human skin, from light to
dark, to represent the men and women who have suffered the indignity
of slavery. Wearing these clothes will be like wearing another skin.
