Paris (AFP)

Slow down: it is by admiring the sunsets over the rooftops of Paris from his office that Maurizio Galante imagined the artistic film on his haute couture collection presented on Monday.

A black mannequin in her haute couture dresses, four colors: the sequences are shot in slow motion on the magnificent staircase leading to the workshops with a panoramic view of Paris.

"We hurry and we lose the real values", says AFP the Italian designer for whom this fashion week, entirely virtual this year, is an opportunity to "rediscover the strength of haute couture, his emotions" .

Amalia Vairelli, model of Somali origin, muse of Yves Saint Laurent for twenty years and who was photographed by giants like Peter Lindbergh and Helmut Newton, embodies these recovered values.

"It represents for me an important chapter of fashion, it is an icon. It moves in clothes and clothes move with it, with gestures, an atmosphere, a very special emotion", underlines Maurizio Galante.

Super model Naomi Campbell called on Monday to "impose inclusion" in the fashion world, in a video posted on the site of the French Federation of Haute Couture and Fashion which opened Fashion Week, saying that there was "still a long way to go".

Models of a certain age are rare on the catwalks and this one woman show at Galante also transmits an "anti-ageism" message: "I don't think you have to be necessarily young to be beautiful", underlines the designer .

- A new language -

The parade, a sequence which has been deprived of fashion this season due to a health crisis, is "a beautiful thing", but so is a film: "It is like theater and cinema with their completely different languages".

"Confinement was for me the moment of great reflection and cleaning up of the fashion system where sometimes too much happens," says Maurizio Galante. For him, online fashion is "a great opportunity to send messages to an audience who will be focused on images rather than looking at who is sitting in the front row", that reserved for celebrities.

"It pleases me to work calmly, to tell a concept," he adds. If he is going to touch "millions of people" with this film, all over the world, the Italian designer wanted to invite the spectators into his Parisian universe.

"Paris for me is that, a Haussmannian building, marble staircases, forged irons. I have the pleasure of admiring the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré Coeur every day, magnificent sunsets", says he.

"Violet, mauve, black, blue": a suave female voice throughout the film pronounces the names of the colors "of this state of mind": "Blue for me is magic, the sea, the night , sunset, dawn, it's very positive. Violet is a very busy mystical color, purple is beautiful, color like the word is Paris and black is all and nothing like this video that can be huge but short. "

A dress made with silk organza tubes attached by embroidery is entirely handmade and requires 250 hours of work. Backlit images showcase moving transparencies.

The earrings are worked in the same way: the four squares are brought together one by one and "move all the time".

© 2020 AFP