MOB Journal — Editorial

MODERN CHARACTERS by Jody Mattioli

MODERN CHARACTERS A visual study that explores the many faces of contemporary menswear through attitudes, identities, and cultural references.

A Project by IED Firenze - Fashion Stylist and Art Direction First Year Students: Beatrice Lorusso - Belén Novello - Catarina Kreitlow - Giulia Moretti - Jeanne Mottet - Kaitlyn Weathers - Matilde Gioia - Michele Siniega - Nicole Di Gino - Reda Khaled - Sofia Dalmau

MODERN CHARACTERS, the collaborative vision of first-year Fashion Stylist and Art Direction students at IED Firenze, arrives as something genuinely restless and alive. Photographer Jody Mattioli frames each figure against an unadorned black curtain, stripping away any decorative backdrop so that the clothes, the attitude, and the human presence carry full weight. What emerges across these images is not a single unified aesthetic but a constellation of invented personas, each one specific, each one inhabited with conviction. The decision to work with young models from Casting Firenze and We Are Models proves deliberate and perceptive, their unguarded features lending the collection of looks an authenticity that seasoned editorial work can sometimes calcify.

The visual language shifts register from look to look with confident fluency. A model drapes himself in a honey-brown fur coat over a star-printed sweater, a silk head scarf tied close, blue eyeshadow applied with an almost painterly boldness, evoking some private mythology drawn from 1970s glamour and contemporary gender fluidity simultaneously. Elsewhere, suede overshirts and bolo ties nod toward an American West filtered through a European romantic sensibility, while cable-knit creams and tweed caps suggest a quieter, more interior character entirely. The white paper cutouts held by several figures, a guitar, a star, a daisy, function as a recurring gesture of playfulness, reminding the viewer that identity, like a prop, is something one picks up and sets down.

Hair and make-up by Alessia Zolla, Ginevra Vestrucci, and Martina Giuntoli at New Line Academy operates as a full creative voice within the project rather than a supporting role. Glitter pressed onto skin, powder-blue liner traced across eyelids, artificial freckles scattered across a cheekbone: each choice amplifies the character logic of a given look without overwhelming it. Lead artist Pier Fioraso and the student team behind the styling and art direction demonstrate that student work, at its most serious and most free, has no obligation to be tentative. MODERN CHARACTERS is a study in how young creative minds, given space and a clear conceptual premise, can produce something that reads not as exercise but as genuine statement.