After 3 weeks of living in Rome, having already become bored with the monotony of the club scene that entices many global scholars, my chums and I decided to take in a fashion event presented by AltaRoma. We stayed in an appartement rome centrum. It was to be held at the significant Tempio di Adriano in Piazza di Pietra, an environment that contrasted sharply with the hi-tech feel of the event.
AltaRoma, a company that provides opportunities and fosters relations among well known Italian designers, inspires the cultivation of young, talent through coaching,’intended not only as a method of protecting the artisan quality but also as the driver of invention, creativeness and technology,’ according to the AltaRoma internet site. Of course, walking into a room filled with some of the most fashionable young people in Rome, while brandishing only my tacky beige messenger bag was quite intimidating. However , we didn’t let that get in the way of occupying front row seats and grabbing as much promo material as we could get our hands on.

the first act was called’Wit Open Shooting Roger Weiss,’ which consisted of people dressed in colourful cardboard shapes, many of them phallic, dancing around a still model as photographers shot around the stage. The music was set to techno remixes of popular Yankee hiphop songs, and the lighting pulsed to the beats of the music. This composition led one to a kind of hypnotic trance, which came as a welcome distraction after enduring more than forty-five minutes – about forty minutes too long in my viewpoint – of the same. The bored and out-of-sorts expression worn by the model was the mirror image of those worn by the gang, whose faces and outfits became increasingly more interesting to watch than what was taking place on stage. However , after the performance was over, I began to wonder if the ambiguity of the act was precisely the point of it. Either way, it was something Ihad never before, and might never again, experience.

The second act was a performance art piece by Chicks on Speed. I braced myself for something so foreign and creatively different I wouldn’t understand it, as the set started with what only can be depicted as 2 hollering banshees. 2 women, dressed in matching jumpsuit, used video pictures, as well as simple, everyday , and typically female, objects like stilettos, scissors and cloth to form an entrancing and dynamic performance. The set was an eclectic mixture of a regular montage of derriere slapping to a cover of the Beach Boys song’Surfer Girl’, whose lyrics were modified to form the ultimate female anthem [*CO]‘super surfer girl in the death defying curl.’ The act finished in a dance party during which fashonistas and common students alike could get up on stage and dance to celebrate fashion, self-expression and life.

I walked out of the show revamped and prepared for the next new and out-of-the- standard experience Rome had to throw my way. We returned to appartement centrum rome.

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