The Great Chinese Beauty
© Stephanie GengottiThe current world order is changing the stereotypes of purchasing power, no longer of absolute dominance of the West. Economic realities are now part of a system where China, with the new silk road, improves its commercial connections and becomes the absolute industrial protagonist. The wealthy Chinese arrive in Italy with the idea of the wildest consumerism without logic. A society repressed only a few years ago, which opens up to waste in the myth of Made in Italy. The impact is strong in the desire to obtain the consensus of our millennial culture: they acquire it in a time too short for it to be understood. They wear it like a dress: a shell that transforms them into unlikely western clones. It is the most superficial and hedonistic side of what we are: the charm of material possession swapped with the history and traditions of a China now part of an increasingly less visible common idea. An excess that transforms the celebration of freedom into the imitation of social models linked to luxury and magnificence that for the wealthy Chinese, represent the only possible Italian Style. A new China then, with the myth of a status that is also told in the cinema: the Chinese remake of the famous film 'Roman Holiday' directed by Zukin Hou entitled ‘The Italian recipe’ will be released soon, in the atmosphere of a modern Rome with the dreams of oriental Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. This apparently objective luxury is contrasted by a new wave of young Millennials who come to Italy to truly study the beauty and importance of our history. A journey of the soul, beyond the superficiality of aesthetics, in search of a real understanding of our roots and our most authentic past.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
