Dinner with Vitelli

Located in Milan’s Repubblica area, Spazio Vitelli is where it all happens for the brand. It is the atelier where the knitwear pieces are conceived, prototyped and even created on occasion. Creative director Mauro Simionato is an old friend. We met when I first came to Milan, around 2010, and we would see each other on nights out where Mauro was playing vinyl sets, although he worked in something entirely different. Looking back, Mauro has always been a multifaceted person, he has lived many different “lives”, all of which eventually led to him founding Vitelli, which is perhaps the culmination of all his passions together: love, music, experimentation, and creativity. In a word, what he defines as “Cosmic Youth”. You’ll have to read the interview to find out exactly what it is and why Vitelli is its beating heart but I would like to introduce you to the people involved because it’s thanks to them that the magic happens. This fateful blend of hearts and minds has created a unique and almost magnetic vibe. You’ve got art directors Enrico Manganaro, known as Manga, and Federico Bardelli, who have been there since day one. They are responsible for the Vitelli image, from the website to the crazy graphics in fanzines and various other collateral. Having travelled through most of Europe cooking up various brilliant gimmicks—mockumentaries, internships and other attempts to forge his way in the wonderful world of art direction—Federico met Mauro and they’ve been together ever since. Manga showed up at around about the same time—I listened to them argue about who came first for a good few minutes—and mainly handles web design. He has a background in graphic design, has worked in various style departments, has a collective that organises events in Marghera and eats a lot of ramen, from what I hear. Then there’s Melissa Aquino who, let’s be honest, gives off the impression that she’s holding everything together. She works alongside Mauro to manage and organise the team, which she describes as more of a family. And she refers to Mauro as “Father Cosmic”, so I immediately like her. Allegra Bertazzi makes accessories and has worked at Vitelli for a year. It was Allegra who invented the crochet bowl that transforms into a very cool beret. Allegra is good friends with Naomi Oke, who studied fashion design and works in the style department alongside Marianna D’Agati, who attended the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts and joined Vitelli when she graduated. Sonali Kumar is on the style team too. She came to Italy from India four years ago to study knitwear design and stayed. Vitelli is her first real job, she was one of the first to join the team, and she occasionally cooks Indian food for everyone. Which sounds amazing. Last but not least, the newest members of the team: Alessandro Grasso, a knitwear designer fresh from the Politecnico; Yueh Wen Sun, a fashion designer who thought he would be pulled into the brand’s aesthetic but has instead brought a little of his own minimalism with him; Roze Paars, an experimental Dutch designer who loves Milan except for the air pollution (she’s not wrong); and finally Giorgia D’Onofrio, who has just been commissioned to handle a new experimental project for the brand when I arrived for this interview. These people are Vitelli. You’ll see them out together after the next show. You’ll see them eat, drink and dance together. They are Cosmic Youth and much more besides...

FF

Did you order food from every restaurant in the area?
MS

Yes, from the ones we eat at most often. You can find almost all the world’s cuisines in this neighbourhood.
FF

I was told you were going to cook for me at first, what happened?
MS

Unfortunately we’re not great cooks. Except for Sonali. Sonali is amazing. She cooked for you.
FF

Oh, thank you. What did you cook Sonali?
SK

An Indian chickpea dish.
FF

Is it very spicy?
SK

I don’t always cook super spicy, especially for Italian people.
FF

That’s a relief (we laugh).
FF

What about the mussels? They don’t look very appetising... I’m not sure if I want to try them.
MS

The mussels from Azzurra are excellent. We’ve got Eritrean coming too, a kebab pizza and then ramen, because that’s all Manga eats.
FF

My compliments on the table setting, it’s truly remarkable. But the thing that most intrigues me is the portrait of Garibaldi.
MS

Garibaldi is mine. He reigns over my kitchen because for me he represents Italianness as a true romantic hero.
FF

There are quite divided opinions over Garibaldi, did you know?
MS

I don’t understand why. He never earned a penny because he fought for ideals, that’s the difference. He was an idealist, a romantic hero. He was passionate about the different causes of all the places he visited—Uruguay, Argentina, etc. He was a great fighter, a man of war. Italy would never have been unified without such an unusual and peculiar person, somebody totally free from power and the dynamics of power. And in the end, let’s not forget that Garibaldi fell in love with Anita: a farm girl who went to fight with him and was wounded. It’s an incredible story.
FF

You’re definitely a romantic.
MS

Of course. I hope we all are, don’t you?
FF

How can you be a romantic nowadays? We’ve just lived through a totally dystopian period where we were all locked up at home to fight a disease that felt a bit like Boccaccio’s plague.
MS

Or cholera. Things from distant times.
FF

Exactly. Light years away. That’s why I ask how it’s still possible to be romantic when the world is crumbling around you?
MS

I think it’s the Golden Age of romanticism. What was the name of the book by García Márquez?
FF

Love in the Time of Cholera.
MS

When everything is crumbling, certainty crumbles too. It’s something that has always happened in cycles: the Enlightenment then the Decadent Movement. When we lose our points of reference and nothing is certain, we are forced to look inside ourselves and cling on to other things. I think these are the perfect moments for romanticism to flourish.

FF

Can you explain what Cosmic Youth is? And why it has become synonymous with Vitelli and your team?
MS

The name is a reference to an original Italian scene that was born in 1980 with the opening of Cosmic Club.
FF

Where was it?
MS

The Cosmic Club was in Lazise, a little village on Lake Garda. It was a little house that had been turned into a club, along a state road just outside the village. It was a project by two local entrepreneurs who had a trendy shop in the Veronese area where all the cool kids would get their clothes. It sold a mix of fashion, vintage, jeans; and it was pretty punk. They decided to open a club as they already had this mini scene but they went really big. It was actually very well thought out and organised. Firstly they called Baldelli, who was the DJ at Baia degli Angeli, the most famous club in Italy—at least in the north, it was one of Italy’s first real clubs—and then they invested in a very powerful sound system. So they had both cutting-edge music and a killer sound. There were 2,000 people there on opening night and the club had a 700-person capacity so there were more people outside than in. But the really unique thing is that the sound that Baldelli created—and a whole other series of clubs with that sound opened, right up to the Riviera: Ecu Melody Mecca in Rimini, Typhoon towards Brescia—was this new sound that had been known as Afro until then but which was later labelled Cosmic Sound. It was a genre that mixed different genres. From German electronica to krautrock, prog, funk and the tail end of disco, reggae and Jamaican music, dub, Bossa nova, Samba, South American sounds...
FF

It’s crazy that this was happening in the Eighties.
MS

Yeah, they were real pioneers from a musical point of view.
FF

Was it recognised abroad?
MS

Absolutely! Because that sound really made the difference and it brought a certain lifestyle with it too. It was quite slow—both in terms of the BPM, like 90 BPM, and the genres it mixed—so it was about speeding it up and slowing it down. Slowing down the faster beats and speeding up the slower ones, so there were these very strange sounds and frequencies.
FF

Do Baldelli and the other DJs from the scene still play?
MS

They’re sixty years old and it’s a bit revival style but they still play. The really innovative thing they did back then was that they had multiple turntables and the first rudimental loop machines so they recorded sounds and then played tracks on top of each other. So there would be a tribal African base with Gregorian chanting over it and then the loop machine going with another sound. They would create these unique sounds in the moment. And this sound, with all these ethnic influences, created an aesthetic. All the clubs did loads of promo, of course, and the DJs got famous with the cassettes doing the rounds. Actual original mixtapes. People would go there and wouldn’t even go into the club, they would hang out in the carpark listening to the tapes, dancing, smoking, kissing and taking drugs. It was mostly weed and acid, although a lot of people did heroin sadly. So through this sound, lots of people started dressing in a particularly ethnic, afro way.
FF

It’s so interesting how the Cosmics, the Milano da Bere drinking scene, the Paninari, and the punks all coexisted at the same time. A total clash.
MS

The Cosmics would actually have referred to themselves as the Baiosi, referring to Baia degli Angeli. What eventually happened is that a whole series of clubs started playing afro because it became trendy and as usual, some of the initial impact was lost. But the real core, which were these four or five clubs in the early Eighties, had this real attention to detail when it come to the music, the sound, the aesthetic and the style too. And that was one of the last original Italian scenes, along with the Paninari.

FF

What would be the typical look for a Cosmic, or a Baioso?
MS

Think Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin but in the early Eighties... Lots of knitwear because that was easy to find in vintage stores or the village shop. The women were Janis Joplin but with that post-70s feel: long Romani style skirts, Goa waistcoats. It was a pastiche of what they could find in local shops but it came from Italy which is what I have always wanted to look at with the Vitelli collections.
FF

And how does Cosmic Youth fit into the present?
MS

With Cosmic Youth, we are carrying forward a series of fundamental values, a mood, a lifestyle, and an extremely fresh attitude. These are people who grew up clubbing, socialising beyond their close friend group, travelling and then coming back home again, not to mention imaginary travel, which is another theme that I look at extensively with Vitelli. So when we say Cosmic Youth, we don’t just mean Vitelli or the people behind Vitelli, I think it’s a wider international scene, it’s the brands that we align with, the clubs we go to... all that is Cosmic Youth. I’m out of it now, but they’re still in it (indicates the younger members of the team, Ed.)
FF

So your team represents Cosmic Youth. And what phase of life are you in?
MS

I’m in... that’s a hard question. I’m in a phase where I want to share as much as possible of what I have learned and what I can do and what I have built with others, starting with my inner circle and then expanding on that I hope. In that sense, Vitelli is a platform that has formed thanks to the collective that has developed here over time. When I wrote our manifesto, I wanted to go really over the top and show off a bit so I wrote: “We are the multi-ethnical punks of Italian couture.”
FF

Really blowing your own trumpet there! (we laugh)
MS

The best thing is that it’s true. In the sense that we make couture, we make a lot of pieces by hand, we have an atelier. Contemporary brands almost never have an atelier and almost nobody does couture. But we do. And of course we have an international outlook and we take inspiration from global scenes and references. But we do all that from Milan, we’ve still got one foot on the street. The street is still our main territory.
FF

We’ll have to talk again in five years and see if you’ve stayed that way or if you’ve cleaned yourself up the way everyone does.
MS

We’ll have cleaned up a bit for sure because the market demands certain things. But our core, our soul, has to remain the same and I hope the team will remain so as well.
FF

I hope so too because that’s what makes the difference. The construction of your clothes is really interesting and then there’s the message that comes across. The fact that you all come out at the end of the show to give this idea of a cohesive group is a real strength. I see wonderful things for your future.
MS

We’re just getting started I think. We’ve got so much to say and learn, but I think we’re just getting started, in terms of structure, project and brand. There are constant influences and we just have to maintain an open and innovative approach. The family grows but it’s always a family. Every new arrival is looked after and helped... and that’s amazing. Growth starts with the family and then expands from there. Shall we have a drink?
FF

Why not? Let’s pour some red. Going back to Vitelli designs, they are all very unique creations which are hard to imagine on a large scale. You only work with recycled yarns which inevitably means a limited number of garments with distinctive characteristics. How does the creation of a piece come about exactly? Do you start from the yarn or from a moodboard?
MS

Technically, we start from the yarn, as you said. In knitwear, you always start from the yarn but usually you try and find the most suitable yarn for the piece you have in mind whereas we do the opposite: we create the most suitable piece for the yarn we’ve found. This has a profound impact on the final product and on our creative approach to the collections. There is an underlying theme, of course, and our Cosmic Youth style, which we are still researching and working on. Our references come from the Seventies and Eighties, obviously, and we’ve got a very free attitude.
FF

But it’s a theme that could evolve, isn’t it? You are Cosmic Youth, and you still will be in ten years, regardless of the historic reference.
MS

Exactly. And the important thing is to continue to convey a certain approach and cultural and aesthetic attitude as well as a lifestyle through Vitelli pieces. That has to remain the focus and it doesn’t necessarily mean the shape of the garment but the look, the feel, and the message. There is an obvious reciprocal influence between us and the product when working with recovered material and recycled yarn.
FF

It’s a huge advantage as well. The fact that the prototyping happens here and you are free to experiment as much as you want on your pieces is quite unique. It’s a real pain to do that within the classic production chain.
MS

Absolutely. We try to have a truly artisanal approach which is part of our research into Italianness. This practice has ancient origins in Italy, it dates back to the Renaissance and the artisan workshop. So this is an integral part of the Vitelli style and storytelling. The central theme is sustainability, which at a broader level can be called responsibility too. Nowadays it can sometimes look like a marketing formula but it’s a priority driven by environmental issues. I would add that sustainability as a central theme also touches on luxury. Luxury understood as the opposite of mass market, where fast fashion has been proven to fail sustainability. And the numbers speak for themselves. So from a certain point of view, we make luxury because luxury historically refers to the quality of the product and the limited availability of that product and therefore it’s uniqueness. So we aren’t just making a progressive statement for the sake of it, we are making a progressive statement within a system that must necessarily evolve in certain directions. And I think that's why it's working.