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“ALBINIANA” at Palazzo Pitti

The exhibition recently opened at the ‘Galleria del Costume’ in Palazzo Pitti accompanies the presentation of the book:

“All power to the imagination. Walter Albini and his time.”

In Walter Abini’s Italy fashion was not art.

In the fifties, at the time of the reconstruction and the economic boom, the Italian fashion was split in between the low industrial production for the mass and the haute couture for the few new rich.

The art world was deeply submerged in ideological realism values, away from any idea of aesthetical contamination, at the horizon just the arte povera conceptual charm.

Paris, where Albini arrives in 1961at the age of twenty, didn’t offer much more: just the charm of a bohemian life and a big fashion archive still in evolution.

In reality the tailoring world was rarefied and exclusive, an international club of wealthy ladies to whom Christian Dior and Balenciaga gave back some glamour.

As Alice Drake so well recounts in the book “The beautiful Fall”, Yves Saint-Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld and surely the young Albini were living in this little old world, populated by fashion plates, fashion parades in Avenue Montaigne, lunches and cocktail, so well documented by Albini in his illustrations for the Italian province.

All this was before the arrival of the students’ barricades in 1968, the feminist ideas and the attack to the middle-class values; before the Americans landed with their suitcases stuffed with rags, theatrical poses, disco music, drugs of all types and introduced the ideas of freedom from social and sexual conventions.

Soon, they say, Yves Saint-Laurent would have met Andy Warhol and the pop movement ideas would have conquered Europe.

Albini is not only of the same age as Yves saint-Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, but also as Warhol: they share the aesthetic sensitivity, the stylized cult of the image, the idea of the artist-the designer-as a product, a brand to be consumed in the mass communication word, eager for new idols and celebrities.

Walter Albini is the first Italian designer- superstar: the first one to seize not only the importance of the griffe, of the designer name on the label, with which he unites different products, but also the identification of name and image, graphic logo and face.

Albini puts himself on the magazines pages, wears his own fashion and poses with the celebrities in his advertising campaigns, a forerunner of a whole generation of Italian and international designers, who will successfully apply his lesson, form Giorgio Armani to Stefano Gabbana e Domenico Dolce.

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See also

• MARGIELA THE INVISIBLE
• PIERRE CARDIN: I PUT MY EMPIRE UP TO ACTION
• SPAIN