GOODBYE UNTIL MY RETURN There are those who still know by heart the gesture of goodbye that does not foresee return. Perhaps because they are the scar of a country. In the investigative dialogue of this research, which explores a goodbye in the realization of its concept —  in the latent hope and in the awareness of an irreversible end — , and not in the current abstractionism, this collection is born.

“In each coordinate is the story of those who left, and the ones who stayed behind. There are dry and hot waves that still shake the foundations of a family stripped, generation after generation, by war and emigration. The object, the only material survivor of the loss, bears the symbolic weight of a country, love and hope. A white handkerchief, the edge of a sheet, a stolen trousseau. There are also crossed boarders and dried tears, evils faked in order to escape. There are promises of melancholy and returns by the shade of a cypress. “Go tell your sisters, don’t do as you did”. A goodbye, greetings to the family, until my return.”

MODALISBOA METAPHYSICAL arrives to Factory Lisbon for the 58th Lisbon Fashion week edition at Hub Criativo do Beato. This beginning of a new phase is an in-person event with a growing digital component – it is meta and it is physical – in constant experimentation, that crosses the geographies of Fashion, Technology, Innovation and Art in a path where multidisciplinary practices meet and new possibilities of permanence are tested. The problems at hand may be complex, but ModaLisboa will be – will have to be – a privileged laboratory for the sensitivity and the awe of creation.

The prefix META means, in its genesis, “beyond”, and both Fashion and Society are moving beyond the physical plan. And we don’t just talk in concrete terms, of code and programming, but in terms of intangibility, empathy and humanism. Less product, more purpose. Perhaps the ideological pillars of this Metaverse, now under construction, can be the mirror we need for today as they manage to project their light on the present: democracy, decentralization of power, freedom of identity, the true connection between people, places and things, without borders.