Tailored clothes made with hospital bed sheets. It is with these symbolic garments that 15 cancer patients will parade this afternoon, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, at the Almo Collegio Borromeo in Pavia. And sculptures will be projected onto their white silhouettes, so as to become works of art themselves. This is the thought behind “Portraits of women”, an event that the National Center of Hadrontherapy (Cnao) conceived and carried out with the Policlinico San Matteo and the ICS Maugeri of Pavia, to dedicate it to women who are facing a tumor.
The Breast Health newsletter – how to subscribe
Like living sculptures
The works that will be projected are the “dressed sculptures” of Stefano Bressani, defined as the tailor of art, who created a new contemporary art technique based on recycling and sustainability. His creations are in fact sculptures of plastic material covered with fabrics from used clothes, which in his vision become eternal. The collection chosen for this event is #picassoreloaded, already exhibited in an international exhibition, in which the artist reinterpreted Picasso’s works through a recomposition of his images.
“The works of the #picassoreloaded collection can express the theme of scars and their processing – explains a Breast Health Bressani – But when the Cnao contacted me to collaborate on this project, while we were discussing it, I had the intuition of being able to transform the women themselves into living sculptures, and to use hospital sheets to dress them. The idea is to take something that for them was associated with pain and ugliness, and transform it into a symbol of beauty and lightness: the demonstration of how, through art, a message can be completely distorted. We will then project the works depicting women by #picassoreloaded onto the models themselves, to transform them again.”
Ladies and gentlemen, here is the Rebirth fashion show
by Tiziana Moriconi
The high fashion alphabet to talk about self-esteem
Today’s event, therefore, will not be “just” a parade of patient-models, but a kaleidoscopic show based on a matryoshka of concepts: the last one, in the centre, is rebirth after the diagnosis of cancer. “I based myself on the symbols of rebirth and self-love to design the 15 models they will wear – she says Nada New, the designer who had already patented the “Transformable Dress” in 1998 and who was involved in the project by Bressani – I was in fact inspired by Botticelli’s Spring and the lotus flower. We cut out over 1,500 petals from the sheets, and designed the crafts and decorations using high fashion techniques. It is difficult now to recognize the origin of the fabric.”
