Text by: Riccardo Slavik

A beat, a hiss, and then, weaving in and out, snippets of songs from the golden days of Italian clubbing, as if waiting outside the giant glass pyramid that housed one of the craziest techno dance-floors of the 90’s. Suddenly it’s 1992, you’re wearing Timberlands, an American flag sweater and dirt bike pants, waiting in line to enter Cocoricò, the Shangri-La of the Italian Riviera. Yet much as it’s deeply rooted in clubbing and 90s subcultures the catwalk debut by Dorian and the Malibu 1992 crew might surprise for its restraint and precision, smartly mixing surface and technique with an exact eye for detail and proportion. Hunting coats in techno fabrics are given new volumes, pockets grow to couture size, 3D logos are repeated like a mantra, as the collection struts on a tightrope between pop culture and high fashion. With its mix of advanced fabrics and luxurious fake fur the Malibu 1992 FW17 collection proudly belongs to that niche of fashion which has gone beyond sportswear, the street, and subcultures to create a space in high fashion that is beyond the impact of trends and hype.

DRY– Malibu 1992 is Dorian Stefano Tarantini ( aka Dorian Gray) & a ‘Ghost Team’, can it be considered a collective? And what do you think of the role of collaboration in this age of interconnection and co-branding?

Dorian– Malibu1992 is the manifesto for a project which uses luxury and its degenerations into society as means of expression and communication. It is born out of the meeting of multifaceted personalities and the need to create an artistic platform to convey fashion, video, art, music, in a present context but celebrating the archeology of all that has made Italy so diverse and so rich in subcultures, many of which often quite unknown. The Malibu co-branding is necessary in order to make the aesthetic of the collection real and strongly recognizable in a transversal way both by people who have experienced the origins of a certain culture, and by whoever is experiencing it now as a revival.

DRY -The crossover between streetwear and high fashion has blurred the lines of what is considered sportswear, where would you position the brand on a street to high fashion chart? Do you even think such a distinction is relevant anymore?

Dorian– The distinction between high and street fashion is vital and important, they are two different sets, two receptacles of culture. This does not preclude a crossover, which in this instance is meant to fill a gap, to open a channel of convenience between the two worlds. Distinctions are what keeps variety alive and I believe they are important but we shouldn’t limit ourselves by talking about them in terms of ‘differences’ when it would be much more interesting if we could consider them as infinite possibilities.

DRY– The 90s have obviously inspired this collection how did you arrive at this mix of references? The Cocoricó reference for example, it sets the whole mood in a time and space but it’s not so obvious on a global level, did that worry you?

Dorian– No, why should it? Cocoricò is much more universal than we might think, you only need to look at its logo, so aesthetically charming, the sound of its name, syllabic like the most ancient of languages, ancestral and remote, a word that exists outside of language. Some of the youngest clients might not recognize or know the references to the club nowadays, but the beauty of it is the chance to depict it as a parallel universe, through a number of clues that I positioned throughout the collection. Hence the re-mix of details, the Prodigy reference, the italic Swarovski appliqués a la Blumarine, the pale violet UV color of the neon lights reflecting on white in the clubs.

Back stage photos: Marco Fusari Imperatore
Catwalk photos: Press Office