#FireTalkWithMe proposes a new way of feeling, transmitting and communicating Fashion to an increasingly demanding audience that expects advertising honesty, brand consistency and creative talent.

In the wake of the state of alarm and the lockdown triggered by the pandemic in 2020, a great deal of soul-searching has taken place regarding identity, the need for community and connectivity. In the midst of this exceptional context, our era has been marked by a proliferation of demands for social justice and a call to settle the account of historically entrenched racism. We are also witnessing a progressively greater awareness of the climate crisis and a growing sensitivity to the challenges posed by ecology and sustainability.

All of this has led fashion companies to understand that telling something new should not just be a matter of “telling something else”, but rather of producing meaningful discourses that generate community and imply the involvement of both the brand and the consumer. Today more than ever before, there is no fashion product or image that does not have a story to tell, and stories are written by confronting the present and the future.

This audiovisual exhibition seeks to echo this renewed relationship between fashion brands, advertising and the end customer in hostile periods. Hence the selection of some of the most innovative, committed and thoughtful examples of communication that have been devised during the past year of 2020 for the SS21 collections by such designers as Balenciaga, Boramy Viguier, Cecilie Bahnsen, Eva Iszoro, Feng Chen Wang, GmbH, Harris Reed, Kiko Kostadinov, Loewe, Marine Serre, Moschino, Palomo Spain, Raf Simons, Richard Malone, Rokh, Saint Laurent, Simone Rocha, Thebe Magugu, Thom Browne, Txell Miras, Valentino, Vivienne Westwood and Xander Zhou.

Perhaps the time has come for us to harness the transformative potential of fashion and, in the face of adversity, to propose a communicative energy that is in keeping with the pulse of the present. Perhaps the time has come for Fashion and its followers to converse with the fire and to harness the flames to ignite a new gaze.

Ana Locking is curator of this project. Her penchant for fashion began at an early age - she received the best possible training for a fashion designer by growing up surrounded by patterns and fabrics in her mother's dressmaking workshop. She focused her higher education on Fine Arts, studying at the Complutense University of Madrid where she further developed her visual take on the world and her passion for beauty, quality and creativity. In 2008, she founded the prêt-à-porter company that bears her name, and since then she has played a key role in the revitalisation of Spanish fashion in recent years. In 2020, she received the Ministry of Culture’s National Fashion Design Award. Apart from her work as a fashion designer, Ana continues to explore the world of art, collaborating with different national and international cultural institutions and artistic organisations through exhibitions, installations, video art, photography, seminars, conferences and master classes. She has collaborated with many institutions, including: MNCARS (Reina Sofía National Art Museum); MUSAC (Castilla-León Modern Art Museum); IVAM (Valencia Modern Art Institute); DA2 (Salamanca Modern Art Museum); the Garment Museum, Madrid; Casa América, Madrid; Canal de Isabel II, Madrid; INJUVE (Madrid Youth Institute); La Fábrica Gallery, Madrid, The Public Library of New York, among others. Since 2011, she has also been a professor at the Higher Centre of Fashion Design in Madrid (CSDMM) at the Polytechnic University of Madrid.