Welcome to Fashion School Diaries, a new Journal column written by students, for students. From finding a home and starting an internship, to working showrooms, making friends, and navigating relationships, these stories are insightful, funny and sometimes touching, and until now, have remained untold.
From a locked kitchen to a cigar-smoking landlord with a runaway parrot, Fashion Business alumna Aleksandra Popova’s four years of Florentine flats taught her a lot. Her advice to students? The apartment hunt is hard and takes time, but like Florence itself, it slows you down and shows you that the good things often come from the space in between, when you have time to wait, reflect and welcome new things in.
The running theme of your student years is this overarching feeling that you are always behind, and never going to amount to anything. Then you have roommates, and realize that you’ll be fine. What they don’t tell you is that you are just a mild case in an epidemic of 20-year-olds who still don’t know how to wash dishes.
I moved to Florence four years ago, after finding out midsummer, sat in a foyer in London, that I had gotten into Polimoda. By the end of the summer I had no apartment, just the audacity to move across the world on my own. Nobody tells you that finding an apartment as a student is not easy.
My first landlord was a bald man. He would have been a great friend if he didn’t lock the kitchen from 9pm to 9am. He also lived in the Airbnb with me. So, there I was, straight off a flight, and into a housing horror story. Thank God my other flatmate was this cool Polish girl who took me out as soon as I landed. We visited all the classic student exchange bars, and I quickly came to the conclusion: never again. An Italian man hit on me for the first time. He told me he knew everyone in the city and could get me into any restaurant. I later found out that this is what every Florentine guy says.
I saw that first landlord again four years later, on a hot August night in Santo Spirito, when the square had somehow filled up, even in the depths of the Florentine heat. “Wow!” came a voice from behind me, “ma sei diventata un’artista famosa?” (So now you’re a famous artist?) “Non ancora” (Not yet), I laughed, never to see him again.
The rest of my first year rolled out across various episodes: a bit of dog-sitting in Sesto Fiorentino, a flat by Mercato Centrale where my upstairs neighbor’s bed had a hefty creak, and like clockwork, every single night, at 11pm, 3am & 6am, I would hear it CREAK, if you know what I mean. For 3 months I slept with a broom by my bed, so that when it got extra loud, I would get up on my chair and bang on the ceiling. I moved out on a rainy December day, when the Duomo was empty and it was just me carrying my stuff in trash bags across the square, resisting the urge to scream, “I am not homeless, I am just moving!”
The longest I held a flat was on Via Montebello, where one of my roommates, later to be revealed as a compulsive liar, would steal my chocolate and deny it flatly. She didn’t last long, kicked out by the rest of the flat, made up mainly of Latin American girls who, like me, did not appreciate her lack of honesty.
After my first year of chaos, to name it properly, I moved to San Frediano with an eccentric Italian woman as my landlord. She smoked cigars in the garden and spoke on the phone for hours. I was used to Canadian suburbia and Eastern European brutalism, but I felt I could get used to this particular type of Italian chic. I was sitting having tea beside well-known fashion designers, on golden beige couches, tiger rugs strewn across the hallway floor, when something began to squawk from what seemed like rooms away. It was her parrot. I didn’t even know people still had those. Last I heard, it flew away.
One year, a founder of a well-known brand and fashion store in Milan took my yoga class on Christmas Eve, and we got to talking about the architecture of Florence. She talked about co-creation, the concept of letting an idea work through you. We agreed that Brunelleschi, with his dome, or even Michelangelo, who started painting as a boy, were masters of skill as much as collaborators with the divine. Her advice: when you need reminding of the bigger picture, as your student years get turbulent and you grow more aware of the ruthless currents of the fashion industry, walk through Florence’s cathedrals, museums, and streets. It becomes a kind of magic spell of its own. It pulls you away from the noise of everyday life, into something deeper, slower, echoing the rhythms of dolce far niente, in the birthplace of the Renaissance. Maybe Florence teaches you that, in order to truly create, we must make space by slowing down. In order to truly know ourselves, we must let the answer be temporarily unknown.
Most of last summer was spent in my garden, working with artist Masha Rudenko in her studio in Fiesole, or at Torre di Sopra, where Dante, Giotto, and Boccaccio stayed as Peruzzi family guests. I hoped to have absorbed their conversations as I sat drawing on the dining room table on summer evenings when the sun would set at 10pm, and I didn’t have to worry yet about my last year of fashion school.
Like everything good in life, finding an apartment takes time and a bit of discomfort, something we digital natives have a tendency to overlook. We want it fast and we want it now. That’s not how Florence works. Apartments don’t roll out as fast as trends do: unlike fashion, Florence is slow-paced and wiser than you. I would love to give new students hope, but the hope is in the wait. It’s the time in between when everything good happens anyway.
CREDITS
Written by
- Aleksandra Popova, Fashion Business Alumna
Illustration by
- Rebecca Migliozzi, Creative Visual Producer and Fashion Art Direction Alumna
CONTRIBUTE
Would you like to be the next columnist for Fashion School Diaries? Pitch your story to journal@polimoda.com.