La Serenissima, La Dominante, the Floating City: These are just a few of Venice’s many admiring nicknames. Probably the most apposite of all in 2020 is the City of Masks.
For the last few days, however, this extraordinary metropolis has been looking forward with both careful optimism and uncompromising care. As Renzo Rosso points out down a Zoom, the Venice Film Festival is the first significant mass culture to have gone ahead in Italy since April. In accord with strict distancing and sanitary regulations, plus with far fewer attendees than usual, it has generally been deemed a success—quiet by the standards of “normal” years but by the standards of a pandemic marked 2020, positively bustling.
Rosso hails from a town only a few kilometers from Venice, has a house there, and runs a business that has always been based in the Veneto region. Which is why he embraced the strangeness of the moment and marked the film festival by creating his own bancarella—or stall—in the famous St. Mark’s Square during the festival’s duration.
“It happened because I was having a drink with my friend in the square one evening, looking at all this empty space. And thought there must be something we can do,” said Rosso. “So I went back to the team at Diesel with the idea to make a bancarella. Under city law these bancarella are allowed only to sell objects that promote Venice, and of course we were happy to do this.” Over this weekend the collection went on sale, offering T-shirts, hoodies, and caps featuring graphically overlaid Venetian landmarks including the Rialto bridge, whose restoration was bankrolled by a 5 million euro Diesel donation back in 2014. Naturally the offer includes face masks, a proportion of whose sales will go towards Diesel’s coronavirus-recovery fundraising efforts.
“This COVID time has been extremely hard,” said Rosso. “Now here in Italy people really want to take the opportunity to go out and to enjoy life while at the same time being careful and safe.” Since the lockdown on manufacture was lifted in May, Rosso has been consulting with Italian government on how best to distribute incentives that will ensure the many thousands of small artisan companies that are the lifeblood of Italian fashion will not go out of business for good. “The problem is that this finance is very slow to come through from the banks,” he said, “but we have been looking at our supply chain and ensured no-one has been forced to close yet.… We might even be able to come out of this stronger.” Fingers crossed.