Fashion Photography Takes Over Milan

For Vogue Italia’s senior photo editor, Alessia Glaviano, the magazine’s very first photo festival is much more than a display of beautiful images. The event, which takes over the city of Milan from Nov. 24 to 29, is an assertion of the power of women.

“This is an important time to hold an event like this,” Glaviano tells TIME. “Because of this feeling, like we’re going back in time, we need to work together to show what it means to be an enriched society, which is to be diverse.” With over 30 exhibitions, pitched up in some of the city’s most elegant venues, the festival, created by Glaviano and Vogue Italia’s editor-in-chief, Franca Sozzani, is a celebration of fashion and photography as an interface for how we view the world.
One exhibit, called The Female Gaze, which Glaviano has co-curated with Vogue photo editor Chiara Bardelli Nonino, looks into the re-appropriation of female identity. For centuries, women have been painted and photographed through the eyes of a man. “But, what happens when the person objectifying is the woman herself?” Glaviano asks. “It becomes something extremely subversive and somehow, the act of claiming back the lens, changes the meaning completely.” Glaviano believes 2016 in particular has been the “year of believing in the power of women,” despite “the news about Trump getting elected”.

Amanda Charchian, whose work is also being shown, says that while she’s interested in the female form in a “really classical way,” the notion of the nude is just a starting point. Many of the women Charchian has photographed are female artists experimenting in their own creative fields, which turns the idea of the passive subject on its head. “I use ‘nude’ as a vehicle for having these different kinds of experiences and making different kinds of imagery,” she says. For her, feminism right now is about “integrating your feminine and masculine side. Not really about making femininity louder but more about balancing the energies.”