DressSpace

It was his way to go on, to build, to renew himself, to give shifts , to briskly break any kind of scheme.

Ready to get angry, obstinated, superstitious, perfectionist.

He used to exhaust himself by bringing all his emotions to the extreme.

He knew to have an erotic panic fire inside of him.

He used it.

In a frenetic way.

With men and women.

Impalpable influences.

Egocentric manipulations.

The disillusion made him hill.

Only then he left the things and the persons he loved.

He lived day by day.

On the vulnerability of the opposite sites that were fighting in his mind.

Inventing the new was a moment of judgment of himself, of valuation of his own capabilities.

He created difficulties to overcome them.

He always started again.

He moved between beginnings and ends.

He believed in astrology.

He was predicted that the first years of the Nineties he would have had a great success.

He has not seen it.

He tests the cocoon of his creations.

Still not completely opened.

And his zodiac sign painted with oil and crystals.

Theatricality of the sign on a white background.

Bright needles piercing through the dark of the inelegance.

WALTER ALBINI

by Carla Sozzani

tests by Anna Masucci

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He adopted, from the tailor who dressed rich women in a poor way, the experimentation with the fabrics.

Especially for the knitwear.

It is the unisex, launched by Chanel in the Twenties.

A challenge against the conformism, an arrow launched to shorten the distance between man and woman.

Chanel represents for Walter the functional elegance, an occidental fashion classic.

He designed and commissioned the production of hangers having the sharp face of Mademoiselle.

She was the steel thread, the soul allowing him stylistic excursions in other territories.

He gave Coco Chanel, who loved the essentiality of women’s body, a symbolic gift three years before dying.

He sent to California a sketch for a competition on how the woman of year 2000 would have been.

Out of theme.

But so revolutionary that he was second qualified.

A woman’s naked body in a rainbow sphere.

“She does not need clothes on”, the wording showed.

“She will use a chemical pill to make her skin transparent showing the tonalities of her emotions.

The woman of the future will wear the colours of emotions.

Changing them every day”.

WALTER ALBINI

by Carla Sozzani

tests by Anna Masucci

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“MY CHILDHOOD BETWEEN PLAYS AND FABRICS”

Angelo Zegna, the patriarch, is 86 years old and live in Switzerland.

Angelo Zegna is the son of the founder Ermenegildo, he started the role of entrepreneur since he was a kid.

“When I was 12 I was in the factory.

During the summer my brother Aldo and I used to work half a day and then go playing in the woods of Trivero.

Daddy had strict rules: first of all the duty and then the amusement, but he liked also foreign languages and sport.

In the factory they did not refrain to touch those wool ribbons just combed, wounded on the big rolls.

I have always conceived wool as an living material, integrating part of our life and with no doubts my father contributed to fix it in our heart and head.

At home he used to speak about work, we used to play but were not indifferent to his stories.

The fabrics belong to our family’s DNA.

After the Degree in Economy and Trade my daddy assigned the commercial department to myself, while Aldo, once finished the Polytechnic followed the chain: from the weaving to the relationships with the tailors.

We lived with the luggage in our hand: the first market was the North America, where there were Italian tailors emigrated who created, with our fabrics, custom –made suits.

Famous personalities visited the laboratory:

Luigi Einaudi, who encouraged my father to continue the project of the Zegna Panoramic road connecting Ribello Mount to the Cervo Valley.

Maria José, as guest in a chalet built on purpose.

I remember also Mussolini and Starace visit”.

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 “As all the people under the Pisces sign they are potentially sensible”

Water and Fire.

Pisces sign with Leo ascendant.

The anticipating intelligence to the access to vitality.

The initiating mysteries and generosity.

The melancholy and narcissism.

Two souls.

The man, pride and power.

The woman, beauty and perfection.

Inseparable.

Confused spirals to be hidden behind an always different mask.

The arrhythmic of seduction.

Cadences without scansions.

The hunter becomes prey to taste the bitter sensuality of defeat.

Wild grasps.

Devoted caresses.

The Moon under the sign of Cancer.

Restlessness, female sensitivity.

Creativity  without restraint.

Impossibility to dominate the instinct.

Sexual abuses.

Natural clairvoyance.

A life was not enough.

He told he was on the Titanic in the night of the shipwreck.

He survived, but then he died in a car accident.

This is why he did not drive.

He was a dignitary at the Pharaoh’s court.

Eyes made longer with the make-up, lips painted in alabaster colour.

He had the talent for dominating a continuously changing itinerary.

He used to take quick decisions.

WALTER ALBINI

by Carla Sozzani

tests by Anna Masucci

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“Who is your favourite historic personality?”

                   “Coco Chanel”

“Your actual favourite personality?”

                   “Coco Chanel”

A hint uniting his whole inspiration.

Rigorous cut.

Absolute simplicity.

Accessories as essential elements.

Narrative methods taken from the Chanel revolution.

Known from the first models.

20’s style jackets with shawl necklines having swan edges.

And bare 30’s style tailleurs, hat adhering to the face.

His style as a base for many revisited versions.

Always interpreted with a different spirit.

He never copied her.

For respect.

He considered her the Muse.

The unique.

He dedicated her gifts of love, an entire collections which entered to be part of fashion rare myths.

He met her once only.

In Paris.

Already at her fading, with thick make-up and a lot of jewels on.

And him, obsessed by the mature beauty, complete and perfect, dreamt that all women could look like her.

They would have been able to make their bracelets jingling on the wrists, could learn the art of being natural.

They would have learnt that luxury is a sweater on a black skirt.

He used to say that he could only fall in love with a Leo women.

Because Chanel’s sign was Leo.

“They are queens”.                                  

With a background of great naivety.

And they are always alone because they use men as much as they need them, then they leave them”.

WALTER ALBINI

by Carla Sozzani

tests by Anna Masucci

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THE LAST OF FIVE: Roberta di Camerino

Fontana Sisters

Emilio Pucci

Ken Scott

Livio de Simone

Lady trompe – l’oeil, Giuliana Coen Camerino, passed away at the age of 90 in Venice.

The fashion icon was taken ill on her boat in Istria a few hours earlier (on which she lived 6 months a year).

The funeral will be held in the Venetian ghetto and the body will then be carried to the Lido’s Jewish cemetery.

Stylist and fashion designer, she was the head of one of the world’s most famous Italian fashion houses

Her rich and happy youth soon gave way to adulthood which saw her as a refugee in Switzerland in order to escape racist legislation.

She escaped from the racists’ raids with her husband, she dressed as a nun, he as a priest and holding Ugo, their first born son, in her arms.

Her obliged stay in Switzerland saw her create her first velvet handbags.

In 1945, after the Second World War, she returned to her hometown in Italy and founded her Fashion House.

The’ Roberta di Camerino’ label is named after her daughter Roberta, while Camerino is her husband’s name.

The label is now famous: a braided belt shaped into a capital ‘R’.

But her real signature?

Among her clothes, it is found in the jersey printed with a “trompe l’oeil” which creates the illusion of  pleats and buttons.

Among her accessories, it is the scarves but above all it is found in those handbags which Grace Kelly was so fond of, named “Bauletto” BAGONGHI. These bags were “plump and stocky like a dwarf” and had green, red and blue velvet bands with gold embroidery.

The international achievements of the label are numerous.

In 1956 ‘Roberta di Camerino’ was awarded with the Oscar for Fashion, the Neiman Marcus Award.

In 1963 the house’s clothes were on the catwalk in the Sala Bianca of Florence’s Palazzo Pitti.

During the 70s they signed an exclusivity deal for its lines in Japan with the huge Mitsubishi Corporation colossus.

Meanwhile the Venetian fashion house’s business continued to increase (by the end of the decade it amounted to roughly 12 billion liras [6 million Euros]), while the Whitney Museum of American Art dedicated a retrospective of her designs to “Roberta di Camerino”.

In 1981 the first autobiography, entitled ‘R for Roberta’, was published by Mondadori and written with the journalist Marco Mascardi.

By the end of the 90s the house was firmly established.

In 1995 the ‘Roberta di Camerino’ donation was opened in Palazzo Pitti’s Costume Gallery.

A collection of her clothes and accessories became part of the history of “Made in Italy“, while in 2001 the ‘Roberta di Camerino’ foundation was established, a non-profit organisation with the objective to offer universities and fashion academies and institutes access to its own archives.

Tireless until the very end she continued to work, assisted by her niece Tessa, Roberta’s daughter, and surrounded by the affection of her 5 great grandchildren.

In 2008 the ‘Roberta di Camerino’ label was bought by the fashion power-house Sixty Group.

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The Leitmotiv brand has origin thanks to the artistic inspiration increased by the Columbian Juan Caro’s gothic influences and the Milanese Fabio Sasso’s baroque.

The creative twosome, tending to the surreal, visionary and fabulous, present the first collection in 2007, in the evocative atmosphere of their garden-house on the Bologna hills.

The inspiration comes from the Trittico delle Delizie (Triptych of the Delights) of Hieronymus Bosh, Flemish painter of the XVI century, where the human beings are in symbiosis with the flora and fauna.

On each fabric of the collection there is a story of images, referring to fabulous atmospheres mixing human and animal world, generating that typical visionary richness of the Leitmotiv style.

Expression of the combination of art and fashion, Juan and Fabio’s work is recognized in 2008 at the Fashion Incubator offering to the brand a great visibility and a particular attention by the protagonists of the National and International world scene.

This prize is followed by a fashion parade in Milan at the Milano Moda Donna and another one during the Tokyo’s fashion week with the P/E 2009 collection having the theme “Life with Butterfly”.

The A/I 2010-2011 collection is on the contrary inspired by a typical phenomenon of the VI century, continued in the VII century enriched with Baroque grandeurs, called “Wunderkammer”, from the German “Chamber of the Wonders”, a kind of space from which the concept of museum was then developed, it was constituted by walls covered with shelves, wardrobes, small cabinets and windows where the collectors used to keep unusual objects, which resulted to be extraordinary due to their originality and aesthetic and intrinsic properties.

The A/I 2010-2011 Leitmotiv collections patterns refashion, in Baroque contexts, images coming from the previous collections archives, readable from the top down towards the bottom side or the other way round, in an absolutely free way, according to the brand’s peculiar “assembly poetics”.

An assembly of visions, stories, surreal journeys, set in a skeleton made of Baroque style frames with reference to a Wunderkammer’s structure, as it happens vaguely in the visual effect on the wool tight dresses or tights, in that kind of symbolist and decadent painting of Gustav Klimt.

The accessories of the same collection do not miss the same decoration patterns, as the “Doctor Bag” made precious by the snail-shaped jewel jack. The gorget scarves are the novelty of this collection, combined with pendants containing old colourful doilies enriched with citations of the past, stressing that kind of taste for the relic that since the beginning characterizes the Leitmotiv of the twosome.

A twosome that succeeded in making dreams and short circuits of an artistic and experimental unconsciousness portable.

Stefania Zizzi

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The materials are the frustrate housewife paraphernalia, with every day use objects such as shopping bags, differentiated waste collection rejects, biscuits and feathers, tin foil, hair rolls, but the effect is the visionary and charming one of a fairy tale. It is in this way that Enrica Borghi, one of the most valued young artists in Italy, creates her sculpture-clothes, or her own installations that reproduce, with the same fictitious materials, home settings as well as fashion show-rooms.

In one of her exhibitions we may find mats made with colourful marbles, glittering trains made out of plastic bottles, delicate nylon slips, necklaces and accessories made with shiny sweets wrappers.

Most of the time it is a seduction game, of a body that is evoked, implied, that needs to be dressed, but the queen-like clothes that shine under the spot lights are often made out of waste materials.

Such a message can be read both in an environmental key and as the playful, domestic parody of an ephemeral luxury, a false fairy tale that finally realises the King is naked.

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ALBINI’S “CLOWNS” TURN THE RAINBOW INTO FABRIC.

Italian prêt-à-porter lies behind this evening dress, with a pattern of rhomboid drawings set on a background of black.  Walter Albini, who draws his inspiration from Saint Laurent, is the creator of this model. “Take a close look at “The clown”, (emblematic name of the dress) – says Gloria Bianchino – “especially the lozenges”.

In the past, these lozenges were entirely created by hand.

Albini instead wanted to realize them with appropriate machinery and opted for accessible luxury.  He was a great anticipator and for this reason the “Fashion” section of the San Ludovico Gallery revolves around him.

The precursor of Armani has created suits, accessories, drawings, sketches, fabric and colours that rotate in the air (some are suspended in the air and held by strings) recalling a Fellinian oneiric carousel.

The fashion sector is permeated with a “happy high-spirited and colourful” atmosphere” as it is firmly focused towards recreating the spirit of time, rather than documenting it in an unemotional way.

The researcher recalls:  “For years we have been gathering all kinds of materials like drawings, pictures and models and we filed them according to a well thought – out arrangement.

On display, magnificent wedding dresses and numerous tributes to Chanel’s intuition, as well as rare models created by Valentino, Krizia and the Fontana sisters.

The exhibition will also expose visitors to accounts related to the important transition, in the Italian fashion sector, from Couture to prêt-à-porter, of which Albini is the undisputed protagonist.

A special corner is reserved for Archizoom, the group of Florentine architects and designers who deconstructed traditional architecture during the Seventies to explore more radical and pop architectural styles, which better reflected the new era.

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Everybody probably knows Nick Cave, the ingenious singer, but there is, in the art scene, another homonymous,  who may be not so well known, but  is as talented and nearly of the same age .

He’s an American artist of African origins, his deep roots reverberate through all his art, joyful, theatrical, tribal, dancing.

His works are actually extraordinary costumes related to ethnic and carnival masks, which sometimes recall complicated liturgical equipment, others fragments of a luxuriant nature, or even stacks of wood and stones.

The peculiarity of these beautiful and complex creations, that he calls “soundsuit”, is that they can actually be worn and are used for dancing.

Nick Cave is always associating his exhibitions with music and dancing choreographies, related to the propitiatory rituals of primitive cultures, or to the   redeeming ones of a certain folklore (even from our own- for example the mammutones in Sardinia).

This year for the first time in Italy, it twill be possible to admire his solo show in Verona, on until 10th of May in the Studio La Citta’ di Verona gallery.

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