DressSpace

FASHION. THE LONG CALENDAR IS BACK

After the cuts and the polemics, a fashion parade week in September.

The National Chamber of fashion president, Mario Boselli, with a synthetic and sometimes proud letter has confirmed that next fashion week will take place from 22 to 28 September, therefore for a whole week.

The union and the cohesion of the sector together with the institutions have led to this successful conclusion.

A necessary return to normality approved by the fashion world big names from Giorgio Armani to Patrizio Berselli and first of all by the mayor of Milan Letizia Moratti.

The Mayor Moratti has announced many new events, invading unusual places, such as the Palazzo Marino, the Town’s seat.

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The new rebel girls’ icon who is changing the fashion

Alice, from the make-up to the fashion parades: her style is a trend

Mia Wasikowska, the interpreter of Tim Burton’s movie is already the interpreter of a style which has influenced the fashion up to the fashion parades and represents a new model of femininity.

In the movie the protagonist interpreting Alice goes hunting monsters, she is a super hero wearing gothic costumes.

An eccentric and very British style that Vivienne Westwood and Alexandre McQueen have made famous in the years.

Apart from fashion and accessories, Alice has influenced also the make-up with a series of nail varnishes produced by Walt Disney.

Tom Binns has drawn a series of exclusive jewels.

Stella McCartney has created, always for Walt Disney, a necklace and a bracelet made in Italy, with pearls and anthracite carrying small heart-shaped bijoux, Mad Hatter style cylinder hats, small rabbits and spades.

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We futurists want to free our race from all forms of neutrality, from dreadful and apathetic indecisiveness, from negatory pessimism and nostalgic, idealistic and enfeebling inertia.

We want to paint Italy with boldness and futurist risk, and dress the Italians, at last, in bellicose and joyous apparel.

Futurist clothes shall therefore be:

1. – Aggressive, in such a way to increase the bravery of the mighty and overwhelm the consciousness of the vile.
2. -Capable of enhancing agility and increasing the flexuosity of the body, to favour thrust during a combat, when on the double or on the charge.
3. Dynamic as per patterns and vibrant colours of the fabric (triangles, cones, spirals, ellipses and circles) that inspire love for danger, speed and assault, and aversion to stillness and immobility
4. – Comfortable, easy to put on and take off, suitable for aiming the gun, fording rivers and diving into the waters.
5. – Hygienic, that is, cut in such a way to allow proper perspiration during long marches and when climbing tough slopes,
6. – Joyous. Fabrics with enthralling colours and iridescent highlights. Use of muscular colours, deep violet, flame red, deep turquoise, deep green deep yellow, flame orange and vermilion.
7. -Illuminating. Phosphorescent fabric to spark off temerity within an assembly of fearful people,  spreading light all around when raining and adjusting the dullness of dusk in the streets and nerves.

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One of the most eccentric and eclectic artists in the history of art, Salvador Dalì, Spanish painter, sculptor, film maker and designer, who loved to declare: “We must systematically cause confusion”,that is, start up the creative process, makes the acquaintance, around mid 1930s, of Elsa Schiaparelli, an ingenious and ground –breaking Italian fashion designer born at the turn of the 19th century.

She was one of the first fashion designers to adopt newly discovered techniques such as the zipper in the same year it was invented and was also able to foresee the success of prêt a porter.

She was a pioneer in that her collections featured a monographic theme as well as spectacular effects on the catwalk.

Elsa is also remembered as the creator of shocking pink. Aristocratic and cultured, she would associate with the leading cultural exponents of the time and many artists that were involved in the surrealist movement, of which Salvador Dalí was the greatest representative.

In brief, the objective of surrealism – which would permeate every medium of art, – is its infinite expansion of reality as a substitute for the previously accepted dichotomy between the “real” and the “imaginary”; such approach relies on the unconscious mind for inspiration in art – the unconscious mind being seen as the source of night dreams and automatic thoughts that lied at the heart of the recently discovered psychoanalysis.

Elsa’s close contact with Jean Cocteau, celebrated poet and film director, inspired many surrealistic designs for her clothes, embroidered at the famous embroidery house of Lesage on stunning materials and clothing.

She started collaboration with Dalì that led to the creation of sensational and memorable outfits. Dalì, inspired by his own “Venus de Milo with Drawers”, designed for Elsa a skirt suit with a jacket that had drawer-shaped pockets.

He also designed the skeleton evening dress that featured a padded ribcage, and the famous upside-down shoe hat, which his wife Gala – his lifelong muse and model in most part of his paintings of sacred nature besides several portraits – wore as a testimonial.

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Those errors done on purpose reveal the actual chic, the personality of the person showing them off.

It is the consciousness of the error making that style unique, above all man’s style, where the line between chic and kitsch is very thin, making the challenge very interesting.

Typical example: Mr. Agnelli has transformed his habit to wear the swatch on the shirt cuff into a very imitated trend.

From Marchionne’s pullover worn instead of the jacket at any time of the day to Obama’s bermudas.

Gleaning with culture and good taste breaking the rules becomes a must to renew old-fashioned clothes making them more sparkling.

But be careful the line is very thin, it is easy to fall in something of bad taste.

A certain kind of charm is necessary to dare these brave combinations.

It is necessary an innate indifference to wear a mended cashmere jersey without looking like a homeless.

There are many ways to transgress with originality.

It is not a mistake imitating Giorgio Armani who combines round or V-shaped neck t-shirts and sailing shoes with a business man suit.

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Who does not remember the sixties cult image of Brigitte Bardot, the blond hair loosed und ruffled, sitting sideways on a motorbike saddle, biker leather jacket, black mini shorts and a pair of cuissard boots at her feet?

Gorgeous.

But dated, with those boots that now are only good to protect you from the road dust.

Time, to say it with Baudelaire, is an avid gambler.

It has made a spinning turn, has laid other cards.

Rules have changed.

For women’s legs as well.

Mirrors reflecting art and masquerade’s boundless fancies.

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Manolo Blahik, the king of shoes: my life from my mother to  Sex & the City.

He opened two new sections of the Footwear museum in Vigevano.

He relies on local craftsmanship since the beginning of his career.

Manolo Blahnik is a worldwide fashion icon, but if you see him or talk to him he doesn’t seem to be in fashion at all: he wears a half-belt navy coat, bow tie, grey stripy socks with a yellow colour heel.

He looks more like an old time dandy; an old fashioned gentleman of exquisite manners and great nature, so kind that he even speaks Italian.

Of Spanish mother and Czech father, he was internationally educated: he studied literature in Geneva; art in Paris then started his carer in London as a set designer.

He reveres his late mother Manuela: “Now she’s not there anymore, but I always think about her and in anything I do I always try to make her feel proud of me.

She used to take me to the Prado museum in Madrid and she would always make me notice feet and shoes in the paintings”.

After his first experience as a set designer, he came to Vigevano and trusting the local artisans, he started his ascent to worldwide fame.

He doesn’t like celebrities he’s an old time dandy who‘s words sound out of fashion like, “ I miss the bag-shoes matching set, wedges look awful, you can’t possibly buy clothes and shoes online”.

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PHOTOS OF AN EPOCH

Carnaby Street, the most renowned 200 metres of concrete in London, is celebrating this year the start of the fabulous Sixties, the decade that saw the birth of the legendary Swinging London and which turned the little street into an icon for designers and artists alike.

Events that recall those golden days shall take place over the whole year.

That fabulous period starts in1958 when John Stephen opened his first alternative boutique, named “His Clothes”, in Carnaby street, followed straight away by many others:  I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, Mr. Fish, Cecil Gee, Cleptomania, Mates, Ravel and others who would become a must for trendy young people worldwide.

In 1960, boutiques catering to different “tribes” started to spring up along Carnaby Street, where both hippies and Mods – a tribe of teenagers with a passion for accessorized Lambrettas and followers of the rock band “The Who”, could find everything they needed for creating their coolest look.

The “Carnaby Street: 1960-2010” exhibition will take place, from February 26 to April 10, at number 30.

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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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Margiela the invisible leaves the fashion house that bears his name

Art closest designer

Now that he has left, everybody is wandering where will he start again.

Martin Margela, 52, avant-garde Belgian designer, has always been an advocate of the ever-changing matter that modifies its shape and evolves continuously.

Thus after he left (officially) the fashion house he founded 20 years ago, and since 2002 in majority owned by Renzo Rosso Diesel group, many are already betting on his comeback in the nearby future.

Not in the fashion word this time, but in the art one, to which he always felt close: some of his waistcoats made out of ballpoint pen caps or other ironmongery’s style jackets would have fitted better in an art gallery than on a catwalk.

A tantrum maybe, or a disagreement with the Venetian king of jeans?

Diesel headquarters deny the rumours, showing satisfaction about the turnover which in the last seven years has risen from 15 to 105 millions.

As a matter of fact, it has been rumoured for a while that the designer-guru, keen for a life change, has been less and less present among his collaborators-initiates, that he always dressed with long white overalls.

Visually very few will miss him, as he virtually never showed his face, nor there are pictures of him.

Martin who started his career as Jean Paul Gautier assistant and has been designing for Hermes is to fashion what Thomas Pynchon is to literature. It is rumoured that he is a very tall guy, over one metre and 90 centimetres, beard and with a perennial protective hat.

An extraordinary figure in such a context given the idiosyncrasies towards any media, publicity included. He reserves one and only exception for his catwalks: he never missed one.

But always hidden among the public, never in the first row, so that nobody ever could recognise him.

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