I was so honored when Etro (one of the most important fashion brand in Italy) called me in my office in Milan, to make an international press release about their new man’s collection 2019. You can read my article here.
I’M YOUR MIRROR
Etro elegantly embodies the bond between the metaphorical figure of the mannequin – the first real humanoid in history, for centuries at the service of man as a “model” – and the image of the robot, also known as the android. Dressed in a highly developed AI – Artificial Intelligence – the android wants to become more and more “human”. It is a highly evolved mannequin, capable of thinking; his face is a mask, as if it was an Avatar.
Yes, an Avatar – a term that takes us back to the very ancient word “in lak’ech”, which in Quechua means “I am another you.” Crossing the past and with an avant-gardist point of view on the future that will become our present, Etro’s mannequins / acrobats want to communicate the important role that humanoids will play in the near future, where the science fiction of a film like Blade Runner will become reality. It is right and proper to say that Artificial Intelligence will be ever more present in our everyday life and that it will have a massive impact on our way of interacting with the world around us. All this we have already experienced with social networks, which have changed not only our habits, but above all our customs, and where the continuous interconnection of “ourselves” with “others” accentuates the concept of “All Together Alone”. We can then use the physical concept of quantum entanglement to draw a parallel between the idea of the mannequins / androids,
which in the future will be equipped with technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) and AR (Augmented Reality), and one of the most meaningful fairy tales of our History by Carlo Collodi, where a material as noble as wood becomes first a puppet and then a human being. A story that has been the subject of inquiry by existentialist philosophers. Matter that regenerates matter, with the extraordinary capacity of taking on a different shape altogether, perhaps more ethically friendly. It is what happens to simple plastic bottles of polyethylene terephthalate when they are transformed into an item of clothing made of recycled materials devoid of toxic substances, hence becoming environmentally sustainable. Sustainability is not a slogan, but a story. “We had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us”
Marta Leo 