I connected with Ezio Costa through a mutual friend. As I looked through photographs of his work on Instagram (@ezio_costa_ ) I was struck by his juxtapositions—glitter and color surrounded by darkness and cement, models transformed into creatures through almost skeletal structures within garments that push the contours of the body to extremes, crossing gender norms but also moving beyond them towards something else entirely. Something strange and striking. Something, in its essence, truly queer.

We spoke over the phone on a sunny Friday evening. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Kirin Khan: What's your thesis about? And before I get too far into this, what pronouns do you use?

Ezio Costa: He/him, but I personally like to play more on the genderfuck side of things, so I use he/him/she/her—for me it’s never a fixed thing. I'm working around questions that arise during my studies in fashion, and how plural masculinities from (R.W.) Connell’s theory are influencing the evolution of fashion, but also how fashion is influencing the evolution of masculinities.

KK: That's fascinating. What drew you to fashion, how did you end up in this academic and industry space?

EC: That’s always a weird question for me because I wanted to do this since I was seven. I grew up in an environment that was not fashion-oriented at all. At the time, I was living on a boat with my parents. We were living in the south hemisphere so our clothes were just whatever was not too warm. And neither of my parents are extremely fashion-oriented. My mom is more visual art oriented. So I don't really know why I got into it—probably because I was absolutely fascinated by the movie Chicago as a kid, it probably sparked something in me in terms of costumes and dances.

KK: The drama.

EC: Exactly! Apart from this, I don't really have an answer. It’s more that I’ve always wanted to do this, I’ve been sticking to it since I was a kid. The only time I nearly changed my mind was in high school for a time period where I was contemplating doing direction for movies. I was studying cinema in high school and was like, maybe there's something there. But in the end, fashion always felt right somehow.

KK: That’s a good sign that it’s your calling, when it just clicks.

EC: Exactly. Especially when it’s present in your life for so long. I think I turned that (unknowing) into a sort of strength. I got into fashion without looking at what was happening in the fashion industry. I was not drawn by the industry, the dazzle of it or wanting to be a star designer, dressing stars, these kinds of things. I just started drawing dresses and kind of kept on going. My idol from when I was a kid was (Christian) LaCroix, I was absolutely fascinated by what he was doing. I think until I started studying fashion I had a very, very small knowledge of contemporary fashion. I was really into high fashion from the early 2000s obviously, McQueen, LaCroix, Galliano, all very crazy, very artistic. But I was never one of those kids looking through fashion magazines or Vogue for fashion weeks, and I still don’t really do it, weirdly.

KK: That’s really interesting. So what are your influences? What do you look to?

EC: I look to artists, mostly. I look at illustrations, photography, etc. In general, when I build up a project, I just have this vague idea around one piece of art or one artist that I like, the visuals, and then I’ll just gather images around, do this huge mounting board and then reshape everything.

KK: Are there particular artists that have been drawing your attention lately?

EC: In these last years, I’ve been really drawn to the work of Matt Lambert or Jason Ebeyer, again linked to masculinities and sexualities. You’ve probably seen my second year collection on Instagram, it was really centered around Ren Hang and Matt Lambert. Edward Burden have also been very present in my references. More recently, I really wanted to do a project centered around Italian futurism. There’s a lot to do around this idea of movements and still captures. I also really like details.

KK: What about these artists appeals to you or inspires you?

EC: Most of the time, it’s a mix between something very aesthetic, and something very weird.

KK: I love that.

EC: Most of them have this sort of double edge, where what they’re producing is very beautiful, but at the same time, it would be disturbing for people. They often go for sexualities, naked people, gay sex, proper porn. Sexuality and gender are very present in my work, especially in my bachelor’s (degree program), I worked around my own experiences and my own relation to gender growing up.

KK: Tell me more about the role gender plays in your work.

EC: When I started studying in France, like a lot of kids, I wanted to do crazy women’s wear. I was completely repelled by menswear, what people were wearing and what fashion had to offer. I arrived at the academy and at some point realized that, actually, it was more interesting for me to work on men because I could use my personal experiences and kind of create what I would like to see and wear. There was way more room. So I started my main collection in my second year to work around gay identity in teenagers—how you could go into a deep depression because you don’t feel accepted, but at the same time, you’re supposed to feel very joyful. It’s this kind of mix of things, so (the work) was really about construction. In my third year, I was working on bears, the opposite. When I was growing up, as a teenager, the whole thing for gays was to be a twink, like everybody had to be a twink.

KK: I remember this.

EC: You had to have no hair, be very thin, it was impossible. So I was like okay, we’ll try, and I was like a little chubby teenager, I mean, a full chubby teenager, so I was really not fitting on that part. I was trying very hard and at some point I was like, let’s not. Let’s try to accept who you are, even though you’re not happy with everything, be good, at least, with everything. I’m not really part of the people that say you should just deal with what you have, and love what you have. There’s always room for changes and to try to be who you actually want to be. But in the meantime, you need to be able to satisfy yourself, so it doesn’t ruin you psychologically.

KK: Right, like it can be really destructive to take a critical lens and turn it on yourself, versus working towards a self transformation that is more embodied.

EC: Absolutely. Which is why in my third year, I worked on bears, and the whole idea of transforming your body into a bear. How on the opposite hand, we’d have twink models, and I would imagine they wouldn’t be happy being twinks, so they could change parts and change their bodies through fashion.

KK: When you shifted towards bears, was that gearing the fashion or more about playing with the male body?

EC: You can see it in the High Bear Nation collection video. Before, I used to use clothes to shape the body in terms of negation, trying to cinch and reduce and reshape into a proper body—think masculine, feminine, corsets, etc. But third year, I was like, I’m just gonna add. I just wanted to add on top.

KK: Interesting. So bears were like a physical representation of excess.

EC: Exactly. But it was also the whole idea between humans and animals, I tried to play on that double notion, using a lot of transparent materials in that collection. The whole idea was to completely reshape the body into something else but still be able to see what lied underneath. It was clothes reshaping the body but still letting the body through to have this double lecture, a bit of everything. One of the main parts was negating the shoulders for example, because if you look at an animal, most of the time it’s the head and shoulders and back just one in front of the other in a row. Something I like to say about my work as well is that I try to see the clothes as the body and the body as the soul. So we are reshifting that body-soul connection, where your body becomes an embodiment of what you are, and then clothes are just what you are presenting, your shell around you.

KK: I love that. Tell me about your process. You mentioned you pull a bunch of images together. Is that like, mood boards?

EC: Yeah. For example, when I am near the end of a collection, and am preparing the next one—I’ve been doing this every year for school, to where it’s not thinking anymore and it’s just executing. So I’ll go on Pinterest for example, just gathering 500-600 images throughout the summer. A big random thing. And then as a starting point, I will make different mood boards around themes and systems. For me, it’s always about trying to develop a sort of language.

KK: Tell me more about that.

EC: So, if you see my Master Collection, it was based on addiction, drugs, psychedelic journeys, losing yourself, out of the body. So I had one or two pages about body modification and double vision, two pages about chemical drugs, scientific approach to colors, microscopic germs, I had a very joyful part about drugs—lots of patterns, lots of colors, kids imagery—and then there had to be the opposite of that, the most disturbing parts of hallucinations, for example. I pulled all this stuff together and it creates a sort of story. A lot of people will redo collages, they’ll do their own drawings, their own prints, but for me most of the time, this is enough and I can just navigate through everything. So if I go under hallucinations, I have my reference pictures and then I can extract systems from them. For example, I’ve been working with getting out of your body, and then I know it’s going to be a multiplication of fabrics or two pants on top of each other. Then I have this visual language, what I want to say, which is the principle of how to use the fabric and the right shapes—it’s gonna be bounding, it’s gonna be extending, it’s gonna be wrapping around—once I have that it’s something I can just dispatch on all my looks and just play around with it. This allows me to make something balanced.

KK: I noticed in some of your more recent photos that you use masks a lot, or covering the face. Tell me about that.

EC: Always. It actually started in my second year, because I was working a lot around the body and how you would reshape it. Connecting back to what I was saying earlier, if the body becomes the soul and the clothes become the body, if I leave the heads out of the equation, it feels like something is missing. I feel like I’ve not reached the end of what I wanted to say. It’s a natural thing where if I don’t make a mask I feel my look is not complete, it would lessen the intention of the rest of the silhouette. It would lose meaning somehow.

KK: So to complete the transformation of the body through your art, you have to include the face.

EC: Exactly. It’s really about taking everything into account. Most of the time I’m even covering the hands in one way or another. If I leave body parts out, especially arms or legs, or the set of hands, it’s because most of the torso is visible, for example, already. I don’t like to comply with what clothes are supposed to be, especially because all of this is schoolwork—I don't have the imperative of selling or marketing. So I decided to go completely to the end, to what I really want to do. Things like leaving the head out, or having sleeves end above the hand so it’s practical, or the pants can’t be too wide, otherwise we cannot move, etc., are restrictions I don’t have to impose on myself yet. It’s nice for me to be able to use the full canvas of the body in the end, to express myself.

KK: That makes sense. I’ve seen runway shows where people will wear bodysuits that cover the head and face, but it’s still not usually part of the piece itself, to your point, because there is still a selling or marketing imperative. Whereas in your work, the depersonalization transforms it from like, “this is a person wearing something” to “this is something.”

EC: Exactly. I always say I’m doing monsters. My little creatures after each other.

KK: I love that expression. You were talking about plural masculinities earlier, how does that figure into your work?

EC: I’m still implementing the idea of feminine and masculine extremes—taking hyper masculinities and hyper femininities and sticking them together instead of finding middle ground. This is how you create over-the-top as well. It creates a sort of tension that works, like in painting where you use red and green, the colors fight and arrange themselves to create something interesting. Whereas I often feel when I see works trying to do the “in between” or middle ground, “so we're gonna go a bit more feminine but not too much”—I tend to see that as a lack of commitment. It hides the extreme. So that’s why I like just switching and playing with those codes. For example, last year I used a lot of military references. I made this one jumpsuit that’s very based on menswear with pockets and military gathering at the bottom, but I made it in a full-on flower print with pink leopard lace everywhere, and balloon sleeves. That’s how I like to play with things, taking something very masculine in shape and slapping ultra feminine color and prints on top of it or doing the opposite.

KK: When I looked at recent photos of the X-trasy collection, the clothing itself was very bright, but the imagery was very dark.

EC: I always like to use bright colors, it also keeps it fun somehow. That collection started with Dumbo and The Pink Elephant Parade—that very colorful and disturbing imagery. I was always describing the collection as “Dumbo and the Satyricon from Fellini had a baby in Berghain.”

KK: Nice.

EC: So that was a bit of the mood. When it came to the presentations, I wanted to keep a rough punk aesthetic, since the feminine aspects of the silhouettes might have been too strong in a nice little shoot with a white background. So I found this place that is actually a club that was closed during COVID so we could literally have the entire club room for a day. It was fantastic. We made all the pictures with two flash, no lights, no arrangements. I wanted something hard, dirty, very masculine in a way, it helped to blur things too, where you couldn’t tell where the top started, the bottom started.

KK: I really liked the dark. It adds a different feel. It makes it a bit like what you were talking about with drug use, rave culture, dressing loud, fun and all of that, but then you’re using drugs and it can get dark. The juxtaposition of what we’re wearing and how we feel inside. And your use of light really emphasizes that.

EC: I was thinking a lot as well about when you’re clubbing and at the end of the night they put the lights on. And you’re in your zone, you’re in a good mood, everything is beautiful in your head. You’re doing your trip with your friends, the music, and then suddenly you have this blunt realization of what’s happening, how dirty the room is, how dirty everyone around you is. I wanted to capture that about drugs, how it can be really nice and suddenly turn very frightening.

KK: One of the things about being interested in fashion is that even within the arts it can be viewed as trivial or superficial. Art in general can be dismissed, especially when there’s war, injustice, pandemics. What would you say to people who view art as trivial or not as important right now?

EC: I think they are right. It’s weird to say but if I elaborate a bit—they’re right. When you’re in times of crisis, like we have with Ukraine, and you put yourself next to it, we’re doing insignificant things. We’re not needed. Maybe we can raise money, but paintings are not going to make things better in the immediate. It’s not food, it’s not going to win battles. It’s not going to answer very concrete problems. I think it can still be important, because it takes the weight of cultural perspective, it can bring awareness and try to make people change their minds. Art can make society evolve with it. It’s indispensable to societies in general. But in the face of atrocities, I feel very useless and powerless against all of this.

KK: What do you think then is the value, the role of aesthetics or even pleasure in our lives? In the face of mass human suffering.

EC: At least in my life, it always took the role of inspiration. It showed me what life can be, how far you can take things, how emotion can play into your life. It’s about aspiration, something I’ve always loved to do and always wanted to do. Inspiration is really important to me. When I look at a painting, I want to paint. I listen to music, I want to make music. For me that is where art is interesting, it can unblock situations for you, whether it’s aesthetic or not aesthetic, process-oriented or whatever, it unlocks a sort of human nature in all of this.