Boh. Try to do that today.

And then the Paninari. Teenagers standing outside a Burghy in Piazza San Babila, wearing a Moncler jackets, Timberland boots and El Charro belts, clothes that cost more than my mother’s car. They even had their own magazine and their own slang. The Pet Shop Boys came to Milan, looked at them, and went home and wrote a song called “Paninaro”. That’s how big it was.

Everything in that decade had the price written on the outside. The jacket had the logo in the place where people could read it. The belt featured the brand’s giant logo on the front, making it clearly visible.

Meanwhile in Southern Italy…

In 1985 I was two years old. I was in Potenza, very far from Piazza del Liberty in Milan, and the only jacket I had was the one my mother decided to put on me. So the whole thing arrived to me late and music didn’t care. It arrived to me second hand, from television reruns and tapes that had been listened to hundreds of times.

I loved it and internalized it so deeply that I carried it with me like a parallel world, a place where I could escape to live out a dream: the kind I saw in Christmas movies, the dream of driving a Ferrari Testarossa, choosing a new fork in the road at every checkpoint, and imagining growing up and driving at night in the rain. I counted the days until I could get my driving license, when I could finally drive while listening to 80s music and turn those childhood dreams into reality.
But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to create my own soundtrack for my dreams.

That’s what I did, and nobody has sent me the invoice yet.