After three weeks of living in Rome, having already become bored with the monotony of the club scene that entices many world students, 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 historic Tempio di Adriano in Piazza di Pietra, an environment that contrasted sharply with the high tech feel of the event.
AltaRoma, an organization that provides opportunities and fosters relations among well-known Italian designers, inspires the cultivation of young, talent through training,’intended not only as a means of safeguarding the artisan quality but also as the driving force of creativity, creativeness and technology,’ according to the AltaRoma website. Of course, walking into a room stuffed with some of the most trendy young people in Rome, while flourishing only my shabby beige messenger bag was quite threatening. However , we didn’t let that get in the way of occupying best seats and grabbing as much promo material as we could get our hands on.

the 1st act was called’Wit Open Shooting Roger Weiss,’ which consisted of folks dressed in colorful cardboard shapes, a lot of them phallic, dancing around a stationary model as photographers shot round the stage. The music was set to techno remixes of favored American hiphop songs, and the lighting beat 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 mins – about forty mins too long in my opinion – of the same thing. The bored and out-of-sorts expression worn by the model was the mirror image of those worn by the bunch, whose faces and outfits became increasingly more engaging to watch than what was happening on stage. However , after the performance was over, I began to wonder if the absurdity of the act was exactly 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 portrayed as 2 screaming banshees. Two women, dressed in matching jumpsuit, used video photographs, as well as straightforward, each day and often female, objects like stilettos, scissors and cloth to create 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 words were changed to form the final female anthem [*CO]’super surfer girl in the death defying curl.’ The act finished in a dance party in which fashonistas and common students alike could get up on stage and dance in celebration of fashion, self-expression and life.

I marched out of the show revitalized and ready for the next new and out-of-the- standard experience Rome had to throw my way. We went back to appartement centrum rome.