Playing dress-up over a glass of champagne with Adriana Hot Couture

Adriana Hot Couture. An Italian name with Roman origins, an adjective that indicates your style and a noun that refers to the overall approach. All very precise and well-balanced. The naming immediately gives us to assume that there is nothing accidental about this project. The anonymity and collectivity yet further evidence of this. So, tell me, how did Adriana Hot Couture begin? And what is the driving philosophy behind your world?

It might sound like a paradox but it was all started for fun. You’re not the first to say that it looks carefully studied but we often laugh about that because hardly any of it was. Things happen spontaneously depending on what we are doing/experiencing in the moment. AHC is an aesthetic and when you know what you like, it all becomes a question of instinct. Among ourselves, we called our first show “One Week Runway” because we organised it in a week. We met up in early September, had some looks ready and out of nowhere said, “Ok, let’s do a show next week.” Any planning that does happen, happens on the organisation side. We are a team of four people and we do everything alone: we can switch from creative to managerial no problem. During the shows, one of us is dressing the models backstage one minute and the next she’s walking for the brand. The first pieces we ever made were for Vogue Italia. Elisa worked there and was looking for specific accessories for shoots. She couldn’t find them so we started making them. At the time, Adriana made the pieces and Elisa and Bianca worked on the shoots. The name is totally random too; we needed one for the credits in a newspaper and we had to invent it on the spot. We liked the play on words because they are all handmade pieces but in terms of style, they couldn’t be further from haute couture, more like a stripper from New Jersey. From there, other stylists began asking us for pieces. They were mostly international to begin with, especially because still today a lot of people don’t believe that we’re Italian, and even more so back then. So our creations started appearing in Dazed, The Face, Reedition, and so on. And then over time we made custom pieces for Rihanna, Jared Leto, and Miley Cyrus, to name just a few.

Visiting your space is an “immersive experience”. Contrary to what I said earlier, the spaces where you create exude spontaneity, freedom and a lot of fun. Everything – from the countless drawers of ribbons, sequins, and lace to the rooms full of clothes – suggests that this is a place where play, in its purest sense, is always part of, if not central to, the creative process. Would you agree with that?

Yes, totally. AHC started for fun and must continue that way, even though some aspects have become more structured as we’ve gone along. We have always envisioned the collections as huge shoots (perhaps because we all come from diverse backgrounds, including styling) where our looks become a way to express different characters and the show becomes a way to tell a story with a narrative. We immerse ourselves in this story and it becomes the backdrop to a couple of months in which everything revolves around the chosen theme. Our studio is “home” and that helps us to play too. And in the spirit of this, all sorts of things happen. We find ourselves working with the most diverse people (probably because of the themes we choose) and these absurd stories become narratives. Luxury hotels in Milan with blow-up dolls, crazy tales of gravediggers; we like to blend our imagination with the truth. Like the last show, which was themed around marriage, when we went to Paolo Sarpi to find a Chinese wedding planner as though it were a real wedding.

Can you explain how an Adriana Hot Couture garment takes shape?

Everything always starts with an “obsession”. We get obsessed with something and that becomes the starting point for developing a piece or a collection. And depending on the project, it might start out as research into materials or concepts. It is always total chaos at the beginning, especially during the research phase, then the organisation happens as our ideas take shape. This initial freedom is one of the reasons we started the project: we want to be able to do whatever we want without any limitations. With AHC, we can do anything and everything: be a brand and do photo shoots, videos, events and performances without being pigeonholed and locked into the fashion system rules. We have never wanted to be on the calendar or do a show every season. We like talking when we have something to say.

What was your favourite toy when you were growing up?

Making women’s clothes for Hulk, playing Polly Pocket, building with Geomag or simply climbing trees.

It would seem that ‘dressing up’ is a large part of what you do, along with the creation of characters. Yet these characters couldn’t be farther from stereotypical and I know there is more to it than this. When reading about you, words like ‘politics’ and ‘feminism’ catch my eye. Do you relate to these concepts?

Fashion to us is both a game and something very serious. The light-hearted side is what allows us to create characters, avatars, and parallel or imaginary worlds to inhabit. It is the dreamlike part and it is very important within our aesthetic and our creative process. Then there is the reality, which is that fashion is a fundamental tool in the process of creating an individual and collective identity, it is a means for resistance and political expression and, from that perspective, we cannot fail to pursue themes that are essential for us and our community. Both these aspects (reality and dream) are essential and they coexist in everything we make.

In the society we live in, how can a project like yours carry a message, whatever it may be?

Through our community.

In Adriana’s case, what is the message that you want to drive home?

Inclusivity, freedom of expression, freedom to be what you want and what you are. If we have helped just one person to feel understood and free to express themselves through fashion then our message has got through. And we have actually been thanked for that before.

Why isn’t Adriana Hot Couture a brand?

AHC is an aesthetic that can be applied to anything. Today it’s clothes, tomorrow it might be anything at all, outside of fashion even.

Now for a boring question then. How is your project structured at the moment, from a business perspective? And most importantly, where can I buy one of your creations?

Let’s say that we are split into two parts. On the one hand is the more creative part, which is where the project began: one-off pieces, handmade, custom. That’s where we make the crazier pieces that stylists want for features. And there are no rules there, we can do anything at all and it’s always entirely made by us. And then in June, we joined the Riccardo Grassi showroom and developed a more ‘commercial’ side for the first time. Those pieces will be available in January/February from shops dotted around the world including H Lorenzo in Los Angeles, Blue Dot in China, and Macondo here in Italy. And we’ll be reopening our site arianahotcouturestore.com for that drop too.

If you had to add a pay-off to the project name, what would it be?

We would borrow a Diana Vreeland quotation: “Exaggeration is my only reality”.

Would you introduce the girls who took part in the shoot and explain why they are Adriana muses?

Bianca and Greta are part of the AHC project. Bianca has been involved since the beginning, she was the first muse for Adriana. All prototypes are tried on her and we could make a whole book of Bianca’s fittings. She embodies all the AHC values: the environment, inclusion, equality. She’s one of those people who just makes you want to be a better person by their example. Greta got involved a bit later, when things were getting more ‘serious’ and not only does she oversee garment development but she’s a perfect PR. She balances Adriana’s need for anonymity because she’s a total extrovert. Over the years, we have collaborated with so many different people but some have become permanent fixtures like Loris Gentile from No Text who has made videos for us from the very beginning and has become a muse for Adriana himself. He has often been the narrative voice for our events, from the vocalist for our Pride float to the latest Neomelodic Wedding show. Paolo Forchetti has always done the music for our shows and we have a perfect understanding: we tell him about the mood for the collection and he immediately knows which sound we need. The twins, Angelica and Stella, were among the first girls we photographed and they have been a constant presence in almost all our shows. We love their duality, they have completely different characters and that represents the multiple sides of Adriana. Saly is our latest muse, we met at the latest show and we fell head over heels in love with her! Some people couldn’t be here today and we want to mention La Persia who lives in Rome now but will always be a muse for us; Luca Anzalone who lives in London but who photographed the Adriana community from the beginning and became part of the team; and last but not least, Elisa, who like me doesn’t love showing her face, but has always had a fundamental role both creative and organisational. Without her we wouldn’t be here having this conversation.

This new edition of Alla Carta is inspired by the film Nirvana by Gabriele Salvatores. We are inside a video game and the main character, Solo, comes into contact with a virus that gives him a form of consciousness. He decides he wants to die so as not to live in that fake, digital world. How do you relate to this world in which real life and digital coexist and often leak into each other?

The two coexist for us: real memory and virtual, real life and virtual. One does not exclude the other. The idea of an increasingly interconnected world doesn’t just appeal to us, we can’t wait for it to happen. We are big fans of youth culture and it is young people who teach us that there are no boundaries to this. That is how we imagine our showrooms in the future: real and virtual objects side by side in the same space.

Like many other projects begun in the past five years, yours launched and prospered in part thanks to social media and the communities that exist within this indefinite digital world. What is your take on this phenomenon?

We love the democratic side of social media, which means that any cool project can take off. We use them very naturally, as just one of many means of expressing our work and communicating our messages. But we often ask ourselves what the next ‘big thing’ will be?