Paolo Carzana's Supernatural Underwater Voyage

"Paolo Carzana 's fingers were stained a deep navy ahead of his Spring/Summer 2026 show, the inevitable consequence of a practice that involves hand dyeing every garment. He works with tinctures brewed from vegetables and fruit, sometimes brushing them on in loose gestures, sometimes rinsing them through until the shade feels exact against his otherworldly silhouettes. Outside Smithfield Market, where his studio is housed with the help of the Paul Smith Foundation's residency program, those fingers rolled plenty of cigarettes:"

"It feels wrong to offer Carzana the label of 'sustainable designer'. For him, ecological responsibility is less a talking point than a condition of working at all. Muslin is organic, padding is bamboo, dyes are coaxed from onion skins and turmeric. His clothes read both fragility and rigour and the insistence that to make something new is also to reckon with the world it enters."

"For S/S26, Carzana named his collection The Last Pangolin on Earth. "I started with the idea of the supernatural," he explains. "Not something far away, but something that already exists here. The Earth has these unbelievable creatures, these underwater cities of octopuses, or colours so bright you can't believe they're real." The supernatural in his telling is inseparable from and threatened by the ecological crisis."

Paolo Carzana hand-dyes every garment using tinctures brewed from vegetables and fruit, applying dyes by brushing or rinsing until each shade matches his silhouettes. His studio operates from Smithfield Market through a Paul Smith Foundation residency. Materials are chosen for ecology: organic muslin, bamboo padding and dyes from onion skins and turmeric. Garments balance fragility and rigour, confronting the environmental context of making. The S/S26 collection, The Last Pangolin on Earth, draws on supernatural natural wonders and frames Earth as genius and humanity as monster. Inspired by ocean documentaries, the work threads despair and hope; colours begin as the pallid whites of coral bleaching before reawakening.

Read at AnOther