Manuel Facchini, Creative Director

MANUEL FACCHINI · CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Manuel Facchini started out drawing on the walls at home, in Verona. Nobody stopped him, and it shows. He has designed BYBLOS since 2006, and since 2022 he keeps its books too: the hand that sketches a dress is the same one that keeps a column of numbers in line. Two jobs that usually glare at each other from separate rooms. He put them in the same room and let them collide. The first collision he ever staged was himself.

The numbers, in fact, came before the fabrics: a degree in business administration in Parma, then London. Central Saint Martins sits on Charing Cross Road: turn the corner and you're in Soho. Twenty-two students in the class and one rule, you never start from a dress. You start from a column at the Victoria and Albert Museum, from a poem, from an exhibition, and push it through the sketchbook, page after page, until it turns into something else. In Soho you buy offcuts and ruin them with method: ammonia, fraying, restitching, until the fabric that comes out exists nowhere else. His print project scored 98 out of 100, top of the class. Ruining something properly, there, was the first step to making something new.

From Fendi Jeans he learns how an archive becomes present tense: sacks of old garments came in, new ones had to come out. From Anglomania, Vivienne Westwood's second line, he learns that madness can be a method, as long as it's pure. In 2003 he joins the BYBLOS team, and in 2005 he designs look 23 of Spring-Summer 2006: a printed silk chiffon dress that becomes the face of the campaign, on Caroline Trentini. A year later he is creative director. Of his first collection the press wrote that it made opposites attract. It took him twenty years to correct the headline: they don't attract. They collide.

The method hasn't changed since; the opposites have. Calatrava and the samurai: an architect's flowing bridges and a warrior's squareness, moral included. A black swan and a fox: the regal and the sly. The macro knits of 2007-2008 with Maglificio Antica, volumes that float where they should weigh. Gothic and technical sportswear, in the brand that carries his name, born in 2015, shown at London Fashion Week, sold in Paris, on the runway in Milan. And today a DNA helix that becomes an earring, a spine that becomes a necklace, a bag called DOPAMINE.

In 2018 he takes BYBLOS with a company of his own and, in September, brings it back to the runway at Milan Fashion Week. Since 2022 he has had full control of the house and has restarted it from zero, as a house that speaks and sells directly to its customers: for the first time in its recent history, BYBLOS is led by the person who designs it. In 2023 the film of the Fall-Winter collection wins Best Fashion at the first edition of the New York City International Fashion Film Festival, in a line-up that year that also honored Roberto Cavalli, Dolce & Gabbana and Ferragamo.

He loves Damien Hirst, because he puts madness and its opposite in the same work, life and death in the same tank, and won't let you pick a side. Anish Kapoor, for matter pretending to be void: a mirror that swallows the room, a hole that is a sculpture. Dalí, because under every painting there's another one: two lovers eating each other with a fork and a spoon, and they are the war. Munch, for a Scream that shakes the room around it. Kubrick, because in every scene there's something you get a second later, and because in A Clockwork Orange Beethoven's Ninth comes out of a synthesizer: two centuries of music colliding in one scene. Calatrava and Zaha Hadid, for shapes calculated to the millimeter that seem to breathe. Music, classical or electronic, as a switch. Cold spring water, in every season. He can't stand emptiness dressed up as elegance. London is his second home. Milan, today's.

DATES

1998 · Degree in Business Administration, University of Parma
1998-2002 · Central Saint Martins, London
1999 · Fendi Jeans
2002 · Anglomania, Vivienne Westwood
2003 · BYBLOS design team
2006 · Creative Director, BYBLOS
2015 · Manuel Facchini label, London Fashion Week
2018 · BYBLOS becomes his; return to Milan Fashion Week
2022 · Full leadership of the house: creativity and business
2023 · Best Fashion, New York City International Fashion Film Festival

"Making something exist that wasn't there, through the surprise I feel first when two worlds that shouldn't meet collide. It isn't taking an archive piece and remaking it: it's fusing the chromosomes of one and the other, until they evolve into a new species."

Manuel Facchini

OPPOSITES DON'T ATTRACT. THEY COLLIDE.