Editorial Coverage
AC9 is the Italian brand launched by Alfredo Cortese in September 2019 with the spring-summer 2020 collection. The brand’s DNA remains Italian, despite being characterized by a linear and clean, Nordic aesthetic. In its collections, fluidity, charm, naturalness and versatility express that sense of freedom that the human being needs to be able to express himself. The dresses are seductive, provocatively sophisticated, and strike with their disarming simplicity.
Born in Catania (Sicily) in 1988, Alfredo Cortese has a past in the photographic field, between fashion and reportage. He approaches fashion because he is seduced by it as a contemporary art form declined in the creative aspect but also in the advertising one. Behind the launch of the brand, there is a rejection of the daily routine and a desire to explore his creative potential, to express it in an artistic language. He decides to found its own label: AC9, where AC stands for his initialis (Alfredo Cortese) and 9 is the number that tells his roots, his family. The point is an affirmation of thought, of form. He says “of defined purity, of geometric bond”.
Censored is the name of his third collection presented at Milan Fashion Week Fall 2021 last February. The shots are strong and exceed the limit of impassivity, leaving the viewer not without reactions or emotions. Here comes the stylist’s ability to play wisely with photography. Alfredo Cortese proposes dogmas and contradictions on a virtual stage, sparking hidden individualities through the cuts in the fabrics. The freedom theme, inspired by the stop sign that is censorship, is expressed with a micro mohair band that covers just a small part of the breast.
(Motto of the Collection FW 2021)
“The stage is set for a transformation. A metamorphosis that inspires a moment of wishful thinking, of freedom imagined. The freedom to be ourselves and a time in which the rules and dogma of a society that is, by now, far too sensitive will not censure us.
Alfredo Cortese, AC9
