An interview in PhotoBooth Magazine on fashion and poetry.
Franco Lacosta (fashion designer and creative director of the ABC hit television series The Bachelorette) interviews the iconic Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi about her life-long love of fashion. Here is an excerpt on their bubbling conversation about the intersection of fashion and poetry…
Puerto Rican Fashionistas on Poetry and Fashion
Franco: As a teenager in San Juan, you were a tennis champion and a fashion model on the “Ten Best Dressed” list. If there were a list the “Best Dressed Authors,” you would certainly top that list too. This season, I was delighted to see you pairing Christian Dior and Franco Lacosta. What is it about design that excites you?
Giannina: Fashion is a curtain that unveils the frenzy of poetry. Fashion offers us clues of the collective mood. Its frivolity is important because it makes light of what is heavy. Everything good in life has light or wants to become light.
Franco: Whenever I work with models, I’m always looking for their light and buoyancy. Maybe that is the dynamic duo that fashion and poetry have in common.
Giannina: Yes, plus fluidity. Poetry and fashion hinge on those transitions between impermanence and permanence. Fashion and poetry require humor and taste. We are the makers of manners, and manners require a clear expression of style. We capture the mood of our time and the fluidity.
Fashion is a curtain that unveils the frenzy of poetry. Fashion offers us clues of the collective mood. Its frivolity is important because it makes light of what is heavy. Everything good in life has light or wants to become light.
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She was a fashion model, singer, and tennis champion in her teen years. She studied literature in Madrid, Rome, London, and Rouen before settling in New York City. With a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures from State University of New York, Stony Brook, she taught at Rutgers University, City University of New York, and Colgate University. She has published on Cervantes, Garcilaso, Machado, Lorca, and Bécquer. A Literature Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, Braschi has won awards/grants from Ford Foundation, Danforth Scholarship, New York Foundation for the Arts, Reed Foundation, InterAmericas, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Rutgers, and PEN. PEN has called Braschi “one of the most revolutionary voices” in Latin American Literature today. Her work is a hybrid of poetry, fiction, theater, and political philosophy. Braschi has published numerous works in Spanish, Spanglish, and English, including El imperio de los sueños (Anthropos, 1988), Yo-Yo Boing! (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1998) and United States of Banana (AmazonCrossing, 2011). Her scholarly publications include a book on Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and essays on Cervantes, Garcilaso, Machado, and García Lorca. Her collected poems were translated into English by Tess O’Dwyer as Empire of Dreams (Yale University Press, 1994). Her life’s work is the subject of Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: on the Writings of Giannina Braschi (Latinx and Latin American Profiles, Pittsburgh, 2020), a collection of essays edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer with a foreword by Ilan Stavans. The United States Library of Congress calls her work “cutting-edge, influential and even revolutionary.” In recent years, her avant-garde writings have appeared in far-ranging cultural spaces such as television comedy, chamber music, art and design, theater, and ecologic urbanism.