Kristina Ti: Fashion Meets Film
Cristina Tardito and I had a lovely FaceTime chat, each in our own house in Italy, respecting Covid–19 social distancing. Designer and CEO of Italian fashion brand Kristina Ti, in 2018 she launched a limited-edition line of clothes with a fashion film entitled Room 101. Cristina replaced the more traditional runway show by presenting her dresses in an intimate, mysterious and sensual short movie. In this interview, she reveals curious stories about her experience with merging the film and fashion industries.
Why a fashion film and not a fashion show?
In a niche brand like mine, fashion shows are a very expensive way to communicate, leaving little space to invest on other forms of communication. For this reason, two years ago I decided to experiment with a different communications strategy, creating the short movie Room 101. Considering the current crisis, maybe this could be a good time to start a similar project to communicate with the audience digitally.
I have a personal interest in how much of one’s passions and choices are driven by memories. Do you feel that this is a part of Kristina Ti and the choices you made for the movie?
Cristina Tardito, Designer and CEO of Italian fashion brand Kristina Ti. Christina is wearing trousers and face-mask from her Summer 2020 Collection.
It is very important to have a very clear memory of the past to guide you and form your interests and taste. At the same time, I think that one should not be slave the past - it is key to have a contemporary and visionary view of the world. I give 50 percent value to the memory and 50 percent value to our world, the future and where we have to go. The past is important to enrich your knowledge and personality, but then you need to free yourself and transform your memory to build the future.
I always had in mind a woman with a specific identity for Kristina Ti. In my imagination, she develops, evolves and takes different directions, but she is always the same woman. Actions, scenography or music all bring me back to this singular person. She is not a fixed character; she keeps up with the contemporary world.
Torino is where I was born. Setting Room 101 in my beautiful hometown was a choice tied to my memories and it was really special to base Kristina Ti’s first short movie there. In a way, I merged what I believe is important about memories – setting the film in the city I was born in by creating something completely innovative, breaking the lines with what I was used to doing in the past.
When targeting your audience for Room 101, did you have a specific buyer in mind?
My aim for Room 101 was creative and not commercial. I wanted to communicate to the Kristina Ti audience with my sensibility and my passion, and its success came from the fact that it was a free and creative exercise without a commercial purpose.
I experimented in a completely new direction, an unexpected one that is outside of my norm – the film industry.
Going into the film industry without a commercial aim brought out something very pertinent: a free and creative expression of my brand.
In Room 101 the actress opens her luggage and hangs her Kristina Ti dresses on a lamp in her hotel room. This reveals an intimate moment of routine and care for the dress and I immediately related to the actress.
Yes, giving the space to a ciak of a woman putting away her dress gently, gives it a different and special value compared to when you buy a dress and leave it on the floor or throw it away because it has no value for you.
A dress needs to convey emotions. I don’t want a woman to purchase it because she has to, but because she feels involved and likes it. The dress might remind her of something, or she might need to wear it for a special occasion. There must be a self–care and emotional value connected to the purchase.
If you think about it, today we don’t need anything. We could live a life without ever purchasing a dress. Therefore, if we buy one, it's because we want to give ourselves a gift and we want to like ourselves - they are objects of love towards us. If one can afford one quality dress, there is no point in buying five that cost as much as the one, because they won’t last forever. Quality is always beautiful and wearable, even if you leave it in your closet for three years before you wear it again!
Taking the dress out of your luggage to hang it so that it does not get ruined is part of the love you have for the purchase you made. Never as much as now do I feel safer to say that purchases should be for quality and not quantity (and this is something I always believed in).
The care invested in your silk dress with refined details produced in Italy with an industrial and creative value, should be the same as giving value to a bouquet of flowers you just bought, a food you personally prepared, or an object that is important to you because it was your grandmother’s.
Room 101 allowed me to underline the care and importance I want my clients to invest in Kristina Ti clothes.
Your fashion film was very innovative two years ago and is very relevant in today’s crisis. Giorgio Armani, in a letter published on Women’s Wear Daily, underlined how there is too much waste in the fashion world. “Enough with fashion as pure communication, enough with cruise shows around the world to present mild ideas and entertain with grandiose shows that today seem a bit inappropriate, and even a tad vulgar– enormous but ultimately meaningless wastes of money. Special events should happen for special occasions and not for routine.”
Armani has demonstrated to be an incredible person. He was the first to convert his business to produce items for hospitals, so chapeau to Armani. Everything he talks about is part of the way I manage my business. Fast fashion creates all sorts of damages, starting from our health, as it produces so much waste. But it is utopic to think that after this moment of crisis we will all become better people by travelling less and wasting less.
The fashion world needs to make us dream. It cannot be converted into a world mostly based on the digital, with virtual fashion shows and videos showing the product. It would be like playing music without instruments. Fashion needs emotions, it needs show.
I saw a beautiful interview where Renzo Piano explained the balance needed to plan the architecture of a bridge. The same balance is needed in the fashion world. Planning means preparing and bringing yourself towards the future. If we would have all planned how to behave in a pandemic by listening to the advice of Bill Gates, we would probably find ourselves in a very different place today. In the same way, planning a collection should mean having longer time to organize each phase. We need to evolve our mindset away from consumerism.
Each one of us should do their small action to positively transform this fast-paced system. I think and hope that there will be a healthy half-way through – going back to designing my line with the appropriate time and selling it in my stores for a longer period of time. Now, when you create a line, you sell and deliver it in one month and in 15 days later it is already old. I hope this will change, and I had this hope even before the current crisis.
Is there anything you learned from this experience that you still cherish today?
I will reveal a small secret. When I started shooting, it was a Monday, and it took four days to shoot, with of course, a very big organization beforehand. The Saturday before starting to shoot I ended up in the hospital due to a heart problem. A normal person would have stopped everything to take the time to rest. But I came on set and continued working. My passion, sense of duty, enthusiasm, and respect for the 20 people that worked with me to arrive to that first ciak motivated me to go on. One month after shooting the short film I had my surgery.
This is the same desire that I need to find now. Not anymore to deal with my heart problem, but to deal with the heart of my business, Kristina Ti.
Cristina taught us how perseverance, passion and self-improvement, alongside adapting to evolutions in the contemporary world, are keys to success. Room 101 revealed the intimacy of her dresses, underlining the care and attention a woman should dedicate to her clothes and purchases: less is more.
Are you curious to watch Room 101? Click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt46Ygu_EXU
