Emiliano Maggi's 'The Club' merges fashion and performance at Nomas Foundation

Emiliano Maggi (Rome, 1977), a former student of costume master Piero Tosi, presents 'The Club' at Nomas Foundation in Rome, supported by Gucci and its art director Alessandro Michele. The exhibition and performance explore fashion as a social marker and a means of direct human interaction, countering digital coldness. Maggi focuses on 16th- and 17th-century clothing, with details like sleeves, busts, and ruffled collars evoking a 17th-century ballroom. The show features ceramic sculptures, including a fuchsia parallelepiped enclosing a piano that becomes a stage, surrounded by colorful ceramic arms. A mannequin displays a garment created during a collective sewing performance. Maggi also organized a live fashion drawing session with students from the Roman Academy, where he modeled in feminine attire alongside a female model. The exhibition includes boots with wide cuffs, cream-colored tablets with costume sketches on biscuit porcelain, and erotic scenes. The work blends the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, celebrating beauty in inequality and challenging definitions of sensual, virile, and feminine.