For this initiative, the brand has collaborated with the artistic couple Greta Bellamacina and Robert Montgomery

 

The date of 8 March should be highlighted on every calendar because Woman’s Day offers us the opportunity to raise our voices all together. Mango is supporting the empowerment that is associated with this day by making a clear declaration as a company.

Mango brings people together and uses the power of collaboration to construct its values. Therefore, the brand has decided to collaborate in this initiative with two artists who already form part of its community, the couple made up of Greta Bellamacina and Robert Montgomery, who participated in the November campaign. They have created an exclusive poetic action for Mango, which the brand wishes to use to connect with art and, at the same time, to send out a message of empowerment. The artists work together and have gained international acclaim in the art world for their messages, sentences, poems, and the methods they use to present them.

Because words have the power to change the world, Greta’s verses reflect on womanhood, a central theme in her work, while Robert creates the perfect background with a conceptual painting that invites us to think. The combined result is inspiring and encouraging.

In Greta’s words, “the poem is about accepting one another with all our heart. Its message is that together we are stronger than we are apart. It is about accepting the identities you decide to give yourself, rather than the ones that are given to you by others; about moving forward, with love and accepting the differences of each one. Tomorrow's woman is as much about the here and now as it is about the future. It is a declaration of love in continuous movement that needs to be redefined and rewritten every day by a family of women who are their own authors.”

Robert, for his part, says of the art work he has created as the background for Greta’s powerful message, in which he imagined, in a very abstract manner, “a time of floods, and angels blown by the wind but staying strong, holding hands and holding flowers.”

 

Biography of the artists

ROBERT MONTGOMERY

Born in Scotland in 1972, Robert Montgomery now lives and works in London, having become an internationally-acclaimed textual artist. He works in different media - billboards, illuminated works, wood, paintings and watercolours. He was the British artist selected for the Kochi Biennale in 2012 and for the Yinchuan Biennale in 2016. Alongside the architects Allied Works he was named a finalist for the National Holocaust Memorial of the United Kingdom in 2017, with his project exhibited at the V&A Museum in London. He has exhibited his own work at the Cer Modern in Ankara and at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, and his work is hugely popular on the internet: his work “The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside You” was shared online over 20 million times. Until November 2019, he had his own show at the JD Malat Gallery in London.

GRETA BELLAMACINA

Greta Bellamacina is a British poet, actress and film director. Born in London, she made her film debut in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at the age of 13.

She released her first documentary, The Safe House: A Decline of Ideas, with Curzon Home Cinema in the United Kingdom in 2016. A love letter to public libraries and a protest against their closure. Greta wrote, directed and played the leading role in Hurt by Paradise, her debut film, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2019. It won the prestigious Michael Powell award for best British film and best starring role. She also played the leading role in the new film by Jamie Adam, Venice at Dawn, released last November. 

Greta was selected as the Young Poet Laureate of London in 2014 and since then her poetry has continued to receive international critical acclaim. Her most recent work Selected Poems (2015-2017) was translated into Spanish in 2019. This book confirms Greta as one of the most significant voices in British poetry among women under 30. The book includes her 2016 collection Perishing Time – which sold out – with 14 poems from 2017 including the anthem Tomorrow’s Woman, which British Vogue made into a film.

Her most significant recent work came about when Pierpaolo Piccioli, the creative director of Valentino, invited her to write ten poems about love, which were published to coincide with the launch of its AW19 collection and were written on the garments. The project received international acclaim for bringing the worlds of fashion and poetry together.

In February of 2020, Greta published her new book Tomorrow’s Woman, having the same title as the poem she created for this collaboration with Mango for International Women’s Day.

Greta and her work have featured in publications including i-D, British Vogue, American Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The London Magazine.