Text Giacomo Andrea Minazzi
@giacomominazzi

Is the memory something you have or something you have lost forever? Bion – a twentieth-century English psychoanalyst – wrote that a thought is formed as a result of the lack of an object of love already met, as an instrument to tolerate the frustration of such absence. The answer would seem to be served.

Living a non-ours era, living in remote places, cities when men wore hats, green loden overcoats, walking sticks, ladies’ evening dresses – Midnight in Paris. Nostalgia is a typical feeling of our time – pay attention that it does not become melancholy. It is true, the fabrics of the past are no longer there – not even the half seasons, if you want – just try to see. Wide trousers in cool wool, worn a hundred times, yet still like new, the real Levi’s jeans. The finish of a jacket, a Rolliflex film, a great-grandfather’s trunk.

Nowadays everything is ephemeral, the five minutes of Andy Warhol, the fast fashion, the stories of twenty-four hours, but there is also an inverse direction. There is the search for something that takes and does not fade. Not a dead memory, something still alive. Something that continues a started journey. Immortality – the children, an idea – is in the passage. There is this desire – and desire is also in place of a lack – to leave a mark, perhaps instead of finding a sign to read. It is not anachronism, without our history we are nothing.

Perhaps this is the sense of the explosion of vintage: the desire to carry on a story, to refuse the ephemeral and temporary, to seek belonging. The coats of the fathers passed to their children, not sought in the wardrobe, but in a shop in Via Gian Giacomo Mora. Grandma’s Sunday teacups in the market on the Navigli.

Perhaps, instead, this costs only less.

Cavalli e Nastri
Via Brera, 2, Milan
cavallienastri.com – @cavallienastri

Groupies Vintage
Via Gian Giacomo Mora, 7, Milan
groupiesvintage.com – @groupiesvintage

Vintage Delirium
Via Giuseppe Sacchi, 3, Milan
vintagedelirium.it – @francojacassi

Mercatone dell’antiquariato sul Naviglio Grande
Alzaia del Naviglio Grande

Photography Gabriella Corrado and Sogol Sobhi