Måneskin meet Alessandro Michele

Maneskin and Alessandro Michele have a lot in common as humans who like to create and inhabit different worlds: the former imagine sounds that don’t exist while the latter sees things that others don’t see. In a special conversation that transcends the mould ofa classic interview, the experimental musicians and the avant-garde designer exchange a volley of thoughts, reflections, memories and visions that CHIARA TAGLIFERRL is tasked with penning. Photographed by HUGO COMTE. Styled by VITTORIA CERCIELLO

Every time they meet, the first thing Alessandro Michele asks the members of Maneskin is always the same: Are you tired?” In this small, caring gesture lies all the tenderness that flows between them, these people who follow each other around the world, one of them designing outfits for the bodies of the others which then blaze on stage, setting everything alight.

‘They have one thing in common: creation for them is an act of rebellion. If we wanted to go back to the moment where the fuse first triggered the explosion, we would find ourselves in Rome, a city that produces wonder and glimmers of redemption in the midst of its chaos.

Alessandro: I don’t want to make it a question of geography, but of energy and trajectories. Rome] is a sort of no man’s land where dreams intersect with possibilities, creating a place of freedom. In Rome things happen because they had to happen—it’s nothing to do with money or business. It’s a city teeming with activity, a she-wolf with multiple teats that comes bearing strange opportunities referring to Rome’s creation myth and the she-wolf that nursed Romulus and Remus]. We come from a city that was pagan before it became Christian, and I feel pagan. We Romans] have a relationship with the flow of life that’s very intimate, pornographic. We are set alight in the moment when everything happens. Here, creativity is born and it proliferates in a deeply human dimension.