You arrive in Palermo and the first thing you notice on the road are the huge billboards with close-up faces of people in sunglasses or those popular stylised ensemble shots (above). Everyone absolutely implaccable. Then there is a chaos of white and cement-coloured houses clinging to the hillsides. The town slopes peacefully onto a bay and there are areas with street colour and life that I remember in many places in Europe when I was young but have since mysteriously disappeared. Mobile fish sellers in tiny vans on street corners. Street stalls that double up as restaurants etc. People are always rather elegant and there seems to be a secret know-how in the social DNA of how to make everything light and a pleasure.
But there’s a darker side – the dream. It affects a significant proportion of the population who, dressed in impossible dark clothes, achieve a look that seems copied in every detail from billboards and glossy scented magazines. Like someone preparing a speech or storing up jokes for later use – it's as if it had been practiced and practiced before being brought into the open.
The look unravels itself before the eyes of the spectators and they gradually take in the breathtaking detail and application that lies behind it. They absorb the subtle ways in which aggression has been formalised by an almost turned-up collar and how ruggedness and disenchantment have been aestheticised to the point of seeming grandiose through the elaborate stitching on a vast fragrant black leather jacket. This might be accessorised with a belt that hangs with exquisitely studied insouciance – making passing references to Marlon Brando, Marlene Dietrich, Sid Vicious, with a nod to Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen. Then only a James Dean-like sultriness can possibly do – too many words could distort this tableau.
There are policemen and security guards who look like they have the most intimate, almost mystical relationship with their mirrors. The dream looms over their heads and the lifestyle that comes with it always seems somehow tantalisingly within reach. It's not a simple question of buying stuff or copying stuff, but a far deeper process. The look is not merely a set of things but a stance, an approach to life, a way of refracting the surroundings, of holding one’s self and finally of just being that will provoke such admiration in others that once you have it, you can glide through the world suspended in adulation – building on it every day until you reach the point where everything you do has an unmatchable authority and releases from others not just grudging assent but open-hearted gratitude.
Everyone smiles with warm soft eyes that seem to hold few other anxieties.
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