The multiverse of Catalan fashion at 080 Barcelona Fashion Week Three days of full immersion in the Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau

If the brands showing in Milan and Paris, with their pharaonic productions and global audiences, are metaphorically the Marvel Studios of fashion, the rest of European fashion weeks could be compared to the world of indie cinema: smaller in scale, presented to an audience of aficionados, but above all far removed from the industrialized grandeur of the big brand fashion shows, which over time have become gargantuan PR machines, local fashion weeks tell of a more approachable and slower fashion, made up of cooperation, hard work, and an immediacy that is hard to find in the articulated assembly lines into which today's big brands have transmuted. The most recent of these was 080 Barcelona Fashion Week, whose programming took place last week inside the Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau, a spectacular architectural complex that mixes Gothic and art noveau, made up of ceramic-covered spires, balconies decorated with dragons and Madonnas, and gold mosaics. Everything was really seen during the days of the program: from the grand shows of Dominnico and Avellaneda; to the creations of independent brands such as Eiko Ai, Habey Club or Martìn Across; to the fashion shows centered on beachwear by Gullermina Baeza, those focused only on evening gowns such as Reveligion, passing through the 080 Reborn collection created by Firmin + Gilles using only vintage clothes or the early 2000s collection-amarcord of Custo Barcelona, which organized a sister show to the one seen at last New York Fashion Week.

Among the most eccentric highlights of the programming, and we use the word eccentric in the etymological sense of "off-center from the rest," is the wonderful design project of LR3 Louis Rubi who presented to the public his own collection of one-size-fits-all clothes, completely adjustable to anyone's body, through a virtual reality experience that was followed immediately by the physical presentation of the clothes on mannequins suspended in mid-air whose own forms mimicked the most diverse body types. The experience is exportable and, as Louis Rubi himself said, will become itinerant across the world, from Japan to Milan, effectively bringing a truly innovative concept within an industry attached to its own commerciality like a respirator. It is precisely this project that is the most expressive of an entire event that demonstrates more and more how European fashion communities are detaching themselves from the cultural hegemony of Milan, London, New York and Paris by acquiring their own voice that is becoming more confident and strong as time goes on, and that shows how the name "fashion industry" hides within it not one but multiple realities-a multiverse that is emerging more and more into the sunlight.