Fashion’s commitment to the new – or, better, its inability to resist the demand for freshness – can at times obscure its debts to the most essential function of clothing: to cover us and to keep us warm. For this winter, Carbone chooses to place upfront this primordial need, making knits and weaves its main characters, and centering the traditions that have refined them (for example, in the North of Argentina) and the animals that provide us with their most noble embodiments. In this season, then, the presence of knits and weaves is more noticeable, yes, but their limelight is reinforced by motifs that recall the conditions in which they are produced: gleeful figures of the women that have best refined wool and silhouettes representing the llamas, one of our biggest treasures. This return to the warming role of clothing, to its ultimate organic truth, does not cancel Carbone’s relentless inclination to fiction. Thus, the items in this collection, while nodding to the Andes and its inhabitants, also invite us on an imaginary trip to the steppes in Eastern Europe, to Slavic traditions and to the details and ornaments that evoke them. The road that started in the most essential, then, ends in what’s absolutely accessory: the pompoms that give this collection its name. To which we should add the white jasmines, embroidered as snowflakes on a purple viscose t-shirt; the little mirrors and laces that rescue a t-shirt from gelid abstraction; the mother of pearl buttons on the cuffs of a sweater; the balaclava knitted in crochet, with little roses and picot stitches around the neck… We could go on. Suffice it to say that by highlighting these enchanting caprices, Carbone reminds us, once again, that fantasy is as vital as warmth.