Today on World AIDS Day we announce the official start of our Care and Take Care – HIV/AIDS awareness program, which specifically targets adolescents worldwide through our social media campaign #kissaidsgoodbye.
#kissaidsgoodbye wants to spread a positive message: “Care and Take Care”; protect yourself and protect the ones you love. It is also a message of solidarity with HIV positive adolescents worldwide: www.kiss-aids-goodbye.com
The project has its origin in the Italian fashion world, which traditionally has been a strong advocate for HIV/AIDS awareness. During the end of the eighties and beginning of the nineties the fashion industry was hit very hard by the AIDS epidemic and talking about this with Bona Bonarelli and Aldo Fallai and Roberto Paganini we could still feel the pain for the loss of so many of their old friends and we were all saddened by the fact that HIV and AIDS are still such a big problem in many parts of the world, especially amongst young people for whom life still has to begin.
Thanks to the creative input of Bona Bonarelli, who during her long career organised some of the world’s biggest fashion campaigns along with famous photographer Aldo Fallai, who was Armani’s photographer for decades, we created a non profit photography project that will focus on the beauty of adolescent relationships, hoping that this message will appeal more to our adolescent target group than images that confront them with the consequences of HIV/AIDS.
Instrumental to this project was also Louise Bakker, herself an adolescent and fashion model, who perfectly understands the language and interests of boys and girls of her age. Being a very opinionated activist herself for LGBT and Women’s Rights, Louise offered her collaboration for the #kissaidsgoodbye project.
The Conceptual Design of our campaign is the work of Rob Van Netburg who like all participants in this project is offering his invaluable collaboration for free.
Together with Bona Bonarelli, Aldo Fallai and our fantastic make-up artist Roberto Paganini we already did a trial shooting in Tunisia last month, which will become the blueprint for several similar photo shootings in the coming year, when after North Africa we will visit Europe, South America, Asia and Sub Saharan Africa.
We especially want to thank our new friends in Tunisia; the boys and girls that participated in our photo shootings and our friend Aldo Fallai who managed to capture the interaction of these adolescents in beautiful and iconic images.
Thanks to the work of our videographer Andrea Montagnani we will all be able to follow the progress of our project with back stage video’s and interviews over the year to come.
Our goal is to create a substantial involvement of adolescents worldwide and for this reason we created our social media campaign #kissaidsgoodbye where everybody can posts his own pictures using this hashtag. Our incentive will be that a selection of the most inspiring #kissaidsgoodbye image makers will be invited to a red carpet Gala event organised around the official exposition of the photos of Aldo Fallai.
Over the coming year we will expand the endorsement for Care & Take Care #kissaidsgoodbye through the participation of many icons and celebrities in the fashion and entertainment world.
The project officially starts today on World AIDS Day and will also end next year on World AIDS Day. We hope that you will all help us in making this a big success.