|
São Paulo transformou-se
da capital das finanças, enfadonha, em epicentro da cultura
brasileira de arquitetura, design, moda e arte.
O jornal The New York Times faz um paralelo entre os dois
maiores cartões postais do Brasil, colocando que o
Rio de Janeiro pode sambar, mas quem está dançando
de verdade é capital paulista.
Os bairros Jardins, Higienópolis e Vila Madalena são
destacados ao lado de profissionais ousados como os irmãos
Campana, Alexandre Herchcovitch, Rogério Fasano, Luisa
Strina, entre outros.
Veja
a matéria:
São Paulo’s Concrete
Jungle
Rio may have samba and Speedos, but these days it's São
Paulo that is swinging like the hips of the girl from Ipanema.
Brazil's largest city — 11 million and counting —
has transformed itself from a dull and featureless capital
of finance into the epicenter of Brazilian culture, where
art, architecture, design and fashion are flourishing.
The Urban Landscape of São Paulo "This is kind
of an ugly-duckling story," says Waldick Jatobá,
an art collector and executive at the Banco Privado Português.
"Even though São Paulo has always been rich, people
thought this was an ugly place." You did business here,
then headed for the beach. So Paulistanos found other ways
to create beauty; in Brazil, if you don't have the beach,
you need something. So for São Paulo, food was the
first wave; leading the way in the 1980s and '90s was Rogério
Fasano, the owner of seven Italian restaurants in town and
its finest hotel, Fasano. Other pioneers — furniture
designers like the Campana brothers, fashion innovators such
as Tufi Duek and Alexandre Herchcovitch, and gallerists like
Luisa Strina — naturally began winning the city even
more attention. As Jatobá puts it, "São
Paulo started thinking of itself as First World."
Today the city itself isn't any more beautiful — there's
just too much cinder-block sprawl — but it's buzzing
with new talent and bold ideas. In Jardins, the city's answer
to SoHo, every block offers an experimental clothing boutique
or gleaming flagship store for one of Brazil's new design
powerhouses. In the Higienópolis neighborhood, innovative
chefs and night-life impresarios are opening doors. And even
in the half-gentrified Vila Madalena district, sprouting up
between the auto-repair shops are artists' collectives and
open-air boîtes where hipsters cluster around bottles
of beer on dry ice. São Paulo feels a bit like an urban
artists' colony, a city that fosters pure creative expression
without too much commercialism sullying the dream. How else
do you explain the city's recent ban on outdoor advertising?
Of course, much of Brazil's global impact has been in the
fashion world — just picture Gisele Bündchen in
not much more than a pair of Havaianas flip-flops. Now 11
years old, São Paulo Fashion Week has gone from a novelty
to a viable showcase of talent and trends. ‘‘The
city is really just discovering fashion. It's becoming mainstream,''
says Cacá Ribeiro, who co-owns the high-end swimwear
label Neon and runs a production company that stages fashion
shows. (He also recently opened the nightclub Royal downtown.
Many Paulistanos seem to have multi-hyphenate careers.) Still,
some of Brazilian fashion's most important names — Glória
Coelho and Reinaldo Lourenço, both current darlings
of Vogue Brasil — are largely unfamiliar outside their
country. But international success isn't necessarily the goal
for emerging talent; there are plenty of stylish folks right
at home. Ribeiro, for his part, says that the success of Neon,
now sold in about 60 stores around Brazil, is due solely to
the Brazilian market: ‘‘Everyone's talking about
fashion. You can feel the vibrations of new stuff happening.''
The cosmos of style has many orbits, and few are as interconnected
as those in São Paulo. In a country where 2.4 percent
of the population is wealthy, according to a study from the
State University of Campinas, it's no surprise the people
with money all seem to know each other. (Paulistanos keep
their circles tight for security reasons too; kidnappings
and carjackings are a fact of life.) Yet there is a collaborative
spirit here that transcends the ordinary social whirl. For
example, at a new cultural center called Escola São
Paulo, the director Isabella Prata hosts lectures and offers
courses to the public ranging from toy design to film directing.
In the lounge and garden, students loll about in low-slung
chairs; at Escola events, São Paulo's most influential
tastemakers — such as the designer Cris Barros, the
photographer Bob Wolfenson and the architect Isay Weinfeld
— mingle as if they were at a cookout on someone's roof.
Eduardo Brandão, the co-director of Galeria Vermelho,
which serves as a similar kind of idea lab for artists of
every stripe, suggests that such a collegiate environment
might disintegrate in a city with more resources, like New
York . Not that São Paulo isn't a place of accomplishment
— Vermelho sold almost everything it brought this year
to Art Basel Miami, mostly to American collectors. All this
bonhomie among the creative class is simply a product of its
freshness and enthusiasm.
The New York Times
´New
York Times` elogia Gil e pontos de cultura do hip-hop
New
York Times elogia Programa Cultura Viva
The
New São Paulo
| 
