Your life in a few lines, exactly from where it starts
Life (mine included) is not easy to summarize in a few lines.
It is, indeed, a very complex ‘whole’ with more layers and with an ascendent shape.
It is a very articulated process, in which the climax is not the physical one or the bodily one, but the spiritual one.
Well, I could say that my life started exactly when I was finding myself able to make this reflection and, therefore, conscious about that working is not everything.
After, in facts, there is life and there is yourself!
The keys I’m using to write you this email, as well as the computer which allows to relate each other, are inanimate things and their energy can be translated only in terms of body mass. The total energy of these lifeless tools minus their body mass, is zero.
Men are also bodies but in their cases the equation is different because our total energy minus the body mass, is equal to X.
It is exactly this variable which indicates the free energy in which life is in.
Our life is, so, a matter animated by a surplus of free energy. It is not of course condensed in our body mass. It is not body but soul or creative spirit, so it is freedom, ability to go over the limits that all the other phases impose to our life.
This freedom of course is used by someone to be bad or good, and someone else uses it to create the new: in arts, in music, in inventions, in science, in poetry, in dressmaking…
Naples – a former big kingdom but also the first republic in Italy to be inspired by modern ideas, unsurpassed destination of the Grand Tour as yesterday as today – has been inspiring talents at any latitude but is also a place of the thousand stories and great schools, from medicine to law.
The innate elegance of its inhabitants inspired many productive trajectories beside fashion.
Your first encounter with elegance happens in your family. Which, indeed, is the second and how do you move on the idea to deal with dressmaking?
Even if it is a city I love and I think is populated by brilliant people, I am not Neapolitan but from Bari. To be specific, I am from Bitonto (a cool little city in the province of Bari) where I still live and work.
There are also here zealous citizens but less than in Naples.
The second encounter with elegance happens with myself, when I got convinced that dressing is nothing more than the external representation of my inner self. So it is what the dresses reveals of ourselves: more than covering us, they speak about us.
And I got convinced also that aesthetics is nothing more than the reflection of our ethics. I tried with many tailors but no one of them worked on me.
It was already clear that sooner or later I would have became the tailor of myself.
So here we are: I try to please my self, to get content and satisfied, to go beyond myself; because if you’re not able to satisfy and go beyond yourself you cannot do it with anyone.
Your relation with fabrics and textures is really new, if we look at the Italian tailors tradition (and especially at the South Italian one) you shape it in a more unconventional way: how do you choose the fabric, how do you taste, smell and interpret them?
The best fabrics have been done by the British, in my opinion. And also the best shoes.
I love their weights, their robustness, their physical qualities.
The Italian fabric is, as you correctly say, more conventional. This is because in Italy dresses are used to be nicer and cooler. Even more nice and more cool than what we are in the intimacy.
The Britons have never been interested in getting noted, on the contrary they aimed to be remembered.
And you can leave a recall of you, also permanent, much more if you’re silent rather than if you shout.
Sciamat is your tailor-made fashion company which dedicates also to the chic pret-à-porter. Can you tell us joys, milestones and also pains as a creative entrepreneur?
I can say they were only joys until this moment and no milestones, given the infinity of my vocation.
No pains either: my company does not follows the logics of the world but its origin – better its origin and its end, the splendor of the good, God.
What do you feel to give to your city, Bitonto (even if you’re often in Milan and in other places for work reasons)?
I feel a citizen of the world but my Bitonto…
The book and the music with you now?
Lucretius, On The Nature of the Things
Michel Petrucciani: Live in Concert, Stuttgart 1998
And the favorite food and drinks?
Bread and wine.
Where do you go – does not matter the city – when you like to slow down the pace, if you like to do it sometimes?
On the sea.
What did you learn from life so far?
Who thinks deeper loves who is more alive.
And that the care of ourselves can be going adrift if it is not forged with the hard discipline of the knowledge of ourselves.
To learn more about Sciamat: http://www.sciamat.com/en/