Maria Claudia Rampiconi
Imperfezione

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". The P.

It's curious how the human soul is morbidly attracted to imperfections, to the small errors found in the objects and things that surround us. It's much more likely that the eye will catch the sign hung crooked than the row of all other perfectly aligned signs. The beautiful girl walking past you with her arm in a cast is more disconcerting than the other precise, aloof, and unattainable one.

In short, since time immemorial, the imperfection of things is a source of attraction and stimulates our curiosity like never before. Maria Claudia Rompiconi, now head of a multimedia publishing company, noticed this when she wrote the essay "Imperfection. The Discreet Charm of Crooked Things" (Ediz. Castelvecchi, p.190). Maria realized her attention often fell on the imperfections in fashion photographs or advertisements that celebrated imperfection as a "status" and wanted to delve deeper into the subject, publishing a thesis on it during her studies.

She says: "The challenge was to narrow the field and not go off-topic because at a certain point, you see imperfections everywhere".

Against the ideology of Perfection and rigor, over the years, a subtle form of transgression has taken hold (borrowed from the behaviors of certain youth subcultures) that somehow sought to reclaim the more truthful "human" element close to us, bringing down the pedestal this idea of glossy and glamorous beauty, which is unattainable to most. Thus, the "fashion of imperfection" imposes itself in communication and language in general: the era of the fake Mulino Bianco families has ended, and now irregular and messy families ("I Cesaroni" teaches) are promising, less clean but much more charming: hairstyles have moved from the primness of the 80s to the "straight-out-of-bed" gel look (L'Oreal), from embroidered jeans to torn ones, and so on.

The real limitation of the book is that the analysis could perfectly well be extended NOT only to fashion and communication but to society in general, widening the scope and providing us with a less ephemeral and more in-depth essay, analyzing, for example, the phenomenon of "trash" or the true thermometers of society's level found in certain youth languages. All things that were overlooked.

We must therefore see how long this "social phenomenon" will last or if, for instance, with this yearning for new rigor and cleanliness (ethnic, moral, and institutional), there will be a return to extolling a certain form of formal rigor in manners and society. This is also disconcerting considering that, 70 years ago, the excess of "rigor and cleanliness" were the battle cries of a certain political faction in this country that led Italy to war, etc., etc. But don't let me digress, let's return to the topic.

In short, as History with a capital H teaches, we perpetually live within historical ebb and flow. And if there were to be a new "wave of perfectionism" (akin to intolerance and closure towards the new and different), rest assured that, sooner or later, someone will point the finger and draw attention to the "new imperfections" of the System and Power. And there will always be someone who can seize and make us notice that subtle "beauty of unfinished things" that renders the things of life less ephemeral and more true.