Park Urbana

The culmination of my efforts and personal-growth over the last five years—“Park Urbana” is a collection which took an entire year of research and creative thinking to assemble. The end of Spring 2020 marked the beginning of my work for this collection. Like many of us, the pandemic had taken over my life -- I felt the way people must have felt in France during the first world war — stuck inside while the world was up in flames. I felt hopeless, like inspiration would never come to me. I only knew one thing : I needed to be surrounded by nature. I could not be stuck in my house any longer. Opting to go to the park to hammock and read, I felt an immediate change in my mood. I had loved nature since I was a child, but I had never appreciated it more than in that moment, in my hammock. The beautifully saturated, green grass, old, mighty oaks—draped with Spanish moss, and wonderful pieces of bark which had flaked off of the tree that I set my hammock on made it clear to me that the natural world would be a focal point of my collection. On my walk home, I took photos and collected various leaves and pieces of bark which I thought to either have interesting color or shape. The natural world would provide me with the forms / silhouettes of each piece in my collection.

However, despite the fact that I had found myself enthralled by the natural beauty around me, I was being bombarded, daily, with the effects that hyper-globalization and the insatiable global hunger to consume were / are having on our planet. Deforestation, greenhouse gasses, loss of biodiversity, and raging forest fires plagued my mind as I moved forward with my collection. Upon learning that the average American disposes of 70 lbs of clothing annually—collectively about 92 million tons—of which nearly 95% could be salvaged. The fast fashion industry is one of the key players in polluting our planet.

My initial thought, “retreat to nature—renounce the industrialized world.” This lead me to begin designing a collection which would have been focused on lightening the load for campers.

My first design was a poncho, which would turn into a tent. Whilst working out the logistics of how that would work, I was reminded of my love for the utilitarian design— something uniquely human. Then, it hit me—it doesn’t have to be one or the other. It doesn’t have to be mankind working through and around the natural world—rather, the two could coexist in some kind of synergistic relationship. My newfound goal was to directly combat the consumer waste statistic. It was from that point that my collection really started to take a life of its own. I would go on to take all of the natural shapes which I loved the most, and make them the silhouettes for my garments. On top of these natural silhouettes, I placed various utilitarian details such as pockets, reflective / inverted spinal pleats, waterproofing / wind proofing fabric coating, and magnetic details. This collection would take the natural and the utilitarian, combining them to form pieces which are inspired by our earth—yet so purpose driven that they become staple pieces, never seeing the inside of a landfill.

The collection title, “Park Urbana,” is an ode to my own personal story. My love for history, language, and culture provided me with everything I needed to weave a name which speaks volumes. Being of both Italian and German descent, I have spent a great deal of time studying the history, language, and cultures of the peoples that lived in those areas, since prehistory. Looking to the Romano Germanic struggle—which would eventually spell collapse for the Roman Empire—I draw strong parallels to our own time. The Romans, a utilitarian people which prided themselves on being ‘civilized,’ and the Germanic tribes, which were spread throughout the mountains and forests in northern Europe, fought until the end. In my mind, we are the Romans, intrinsically different / better than all other life forms—of course, that was sarcasm, but I believe it illustrates the scene which my mind conjured up while I worked on coming up with a title. So, the word “Park” finds its roots in the Proto-Germanic language. The word “Urbana,” on the other hand, finds its roots in Latin. My title, “Park Urbana,” brings together words from two peoples which were diametrically opposed. Park, the natural—Urbana, the manmade / utilitarian. Just as these two words work together to form the perfect title for my collection, my designs promote the idea that mankind and the natural world can work together for the benefit of all parties involved.

Working on this collection, I no longer found myself terrified for the future of our natural world. Rather, I became increasingly optimistic about the prospects of mankind’s ability to better itself. This collection, for me, is a foreshadowing of things to come. The simple fact that—as a species—we cannot keep going in the direction that we are going, to me, is reason enough to believe that we will make a change.