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"&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;M A NOMAD,&amp;quot; began Nicola Formichetti this afternoon. &amp;quot;I was born in Japan, brought up in Italy, lived in London until I was 30, then I moved to New York. I&amp;#039;m a real hybrid.&amp;quot; At the Cond\u00E9 Nast International Luxury Conference, the Diesel Artistic Director chose two of the most pressing issues of current times: social media and gender-neutral fashion. &amp;quot;Today, I&amp;#039;m not loving social media. I have a love-hate relationship with it, as it can completely eat you,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Today, of course, it&amp;#039;s important that a brand uses it, but at the same time I think we&amp;#039;re too obsessed with likes and followers - to the point that you end up creating things to get likes and followers and that&amp;#039;s wrong.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s important to have a journey and a relationship with your community,&amp;quot; he continued. &amp;quot;Instagram is great, but I do less now because it&amp;#039;s becoming more of a portfolio. It&amp;#039;s great to showcase your work and your brand, but platforms to have direct conversations are better. I love Snapchat because it&amp;#039;s a 3D version of your life, you can really go deep. Now I&amp;#039;m thinking, &amp;#039;How can a brand use Snapchat?&amp;#039; I&amp;#039;d love to use it for Diesel.&amp;quot; On the subject of gender-neutral fashion, for which he is a huge supporter, Formichetti used Asia as an example that Western countries should follow. &amp;quot;It has to [be something everyone is talking about] and that&amp;#039;s why I&amp;#039;m pushing for it,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re in Asia, it is more obvious that boys and girls share more in common - from fashion to make-up to music, it&amp;#039;s much more open. Boys are more experimental and girls are more confident. For me, its great we&amp;#039;re talking about it so that it becomes mainstream, because this subject of sexuality and gender is important. Fashion can be narrow-minded. When I look around me at friends and people who wear my clothes, we come in different races, body sizes and gender too - it&amp;#039;s important we support it.&amp;quot; Formichetti also took the opportunity to talk about his own brand, NicoPanda - called so after his nickname. &amp;quot;I launched it as an anti-Hello Kitty - a punk Hello Kitty,&amp;quot; he smiled. &amp;quot;It started as a character that I could put on T-shirts, so that my community could go online and buy it, but now I have a show in Paris and it&amp;#039;s going really well. We have a huge plan to expand. At the moment, it&amp;#039;s just friends and family as investors and mostly my own money, but we are talking to gaming and beauty companies too.&amp;quot; CNILux &amp;quot;Suzy&amp;quot; and the Seoul Skyline from natasha cowan on Vimeo. By Scarlett Conlon, reporting live from the Cond\u00E9 Nast International Luxury Conference in Seoul"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.vogue.it/suzy-menkes/2016/04/22/cnilux-day-two-formichettis-fun-with-fashion/>