To say goodbye. And start again

2020 has been a turning point.
As a Foundation celebrating its first tenth anniversary, it has been fundamental to understand the resources and potentialities we had, and identify the best ways to arrange it for our audience. A real community, to be precise, for whom we reorganized our social media channels, transformed into a sort of expanded magazine telling a different episode from our history day by day. Our storytelling lives thanks to your contribution too, because thanks to events such as Achieve the Archive, the archival soul of the Foundation has become even more precious, with light coming from your garments and memories.

But we didn’t want to be too close to the past – on the contrary, FILA has always been in search of the future. That’s why we decided to launch another contest, Creativi in FILA: what happens when new generations of artists deal with fashion and the past turning into myth? We didn’t get only one answer – we got 136, as much as the participating works!

The more we think about it, the more we realize that the limitations related to the pandemic haven’t messed with our fantasy – if possible, they made it even stronger. We projected brand new activities for our community’s summer camps. We teamed up with Casa Zegna and MeBo – Meanbrea and Botalla Museum (two institutions preserving the past and investigating the future, just like us) to structure an itinerary of local tourism. We even gave voice to the female protagonists of our history, for a successful, totally digital edition of Archivissima, the Italian Festival of Archives.

To get to the point, if there’s something that 2020 taught us is that the only possible reactions to critic situations are driven by ideas and attitude. Like Ciccio Graziani’s stubborn, straight-forward one: our ‘GuardiaFILA’ is waiting for you every Tuesday to give pills about soccer and wisdom. Another suggestion is given by Wonnie’s shyness: our mascotte – the kindest bear of them all – demonstrates that being good is not an overrated quality, and that a smile is worth much more than any envy or cynicism.

This is the attitude through which we say goodbye to 2020.
It’s the attitude we decided to adopt to get through new challenges and adventures.
Happy new year, to you all.