Punk Love

Punk Love is a love story told in a single room. Photographer and creative director Monica Lazzarato builds a warm, almost sepia world of ornate bed frames, patterned wallpaper and lamplight, then lets two characters loose inside it. Models Aleksandra Sham (TANK) and Maksym Rassokha (Independent) argue, dance, embrace and drift apart across the frames like the leads of an old film.

Francesco Salimena’s styling takes punk’s codes and dresses them up. Tartan and checks, sharp tailoring and slouchy layers come from Jean Paul Gaultier, Marni, Jil Sander, Marsèll and Adidas Originals, alongside Italian designers including Cristian Rocco Rizzo, Marta Belloni, Sara Trovatelli, Altea Lunetta and Martino Losco, and archive pieces. The result is rebellion as a mood rather than a uniform: polished enough for a grand hotel, scruffy enough to be thrown out of one.

Movement matters here. Several frames are blurred mid-dance, giving the story the loose, handheld energy of a night that runs later than planned, while Daniele Cancemii’s hair and Maria Grazia Arcese’s make-up, assisted by Eulalia Andreotti, keep the faces natural and slightly undone.

It is a reminder that punk was always a romantic movement as much as an angry one, and that the two have never been far apart.