Italy’s High Fashion on the Factory Floor
LONDON
— A cathedral-like structure soars overhead — in fitting grandeur to
the gorgeous gowns below: Valentino’s black silk, Dolce & Gabbana’s
Sicilian flowers, Capucci’s sweeping geometry in grass green and
shocking pink.
But what is that rhythmic sound, penetrating the background music? It is the hum and click of a factory sewing machine.
“The
Glamour of Italian Fashion: 1945–2014” at the Victoria & Albert
Museum from Saturday to July 27 is a rare show that chronicles the birth
of an industry and celebrates its beating technological heart.
It
would have been easy for the curator, Sonnet Stanfill, to fill the
museum’s rooms with splashy fashion from the 1980s and with today’s red
carpet gowns. But she chose, instead, to measure Italian fashion as it
moved from the ruins of the postwar period and the “sartoria,” or
dressmaker wardrobes, to what is still — even after the invasion of
Chinese factories into the heartland of Prato — the most effective
industrial fashion machine in the world.
“Because
this subject hasn’t been done, it offered us — the V&A — an
opportunity to tell it in broad chronology, focusing on points of
influence,” Ms. Stanfill said. “What we don’t have is a chronicle of
Armani’s career or of Prada. It’s about key examples that help move the
story along.”
Italian
fashion history started in Florence, and the exhibition begins there
with a photograph of ruined buildings after the Second World War. That
morphs into displays of dresses against a background of twinkling
chandeliers in the Sala Bianca, where couturiers, little known outside
their Italian habitat, created dresses for contessas.
In
Ms. Stanfill’s chronology, the kickoff point for Italian fashion was
1951, when the Florentine buying agent Giovanni Battista Giorgini opened
up his home to American retailers like Bergdorf Goodman and I. Magnin,
seducing them with a dolce vita of society balls and parties in his
city’s Boboli gardens.
This
was a period when the Parisian couturier Pierre Balmain sneered, “Let
the Americans play around with baby bonnets in Italy — they’ll come to
us for their serious buying.”
Yet Rome became a beacon for movie stars from the 1950s, and a striking
section called “Hollywood on the Tiber” includes movies on giant
screens, dresses worn by Ava Gardner or Audrey Hepburn and an image of
Liz Taylor with glinting Bulgari emeralds.
The
Italians had been smart enough to diversify from ball gowns to a
postwar sporty glamour, represented in this exhibition by Irene
Galitzine’s famous “palazzo pajamas” and Emilio Pucci’s beach and ski
wear. A Pucci display has a mannequin in a patterned shirt and matching
hose mounting a silvered green Vespa scooter, that symbol of youthful
sexiness and postwar freedom.
Although
Ms. Stanfill said that it was “quite daunting to concentrate on 70
years of fashion production,” the exhibition advances at a crisp pace —
save a display of the dull wardrobe of a bourgeois wife.
The
show embraces tailoring with verve, demonstrating that the differences
between the seductive Neapolitan style and the elegant Milanese look are
all about the sexual charge of the Alpha male. (John F. Kennedy chose a
sensual suit from the Roman designer Angelo Litrico.)
But
it is the exhibition’s second half that gets to the point: how Italy,
for all its regional variations and often disputing designers, managed
to make high fashion on the factory floor.
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Visitors
can gaze at Krizia’s knitted cat on the breast of a sweater or the
intricacy of Missoni’s stitches. They will wonder at Trussardi’s
laser-cut leather, Romeo Gigli’s romantic drapes, Moschino’s cheeky,
iconoclastic designs and Gianni Versace’s sexually charged menswear. And
so they should, since this section is labeled “The Cult of the Fashion
Designer.”
That
cult is defined by Anna Piaggi, the late and much lamented fashion
oracle, as “a secret society, made up of pioneers, a few inventors and a
few poets. They are the new phenomenon and the new elite.”
Some
of those featured — like Walter Albini and Fiorucci — are fading names.
And even with the early work of Giorgio Armani on display and a vitrine
devoted to the textiles that helped create the extravagant gestures of
Gianfranco Ferré, the real story of Italian fashion is in a digital map
showing the areas of production: silk from Como, wool from Biella and
leather goods from Tuscany, made famous by Gucci and Prada.
The
exhibition’s accompanying V&A book, edited by Ms. Stanfill and
including essays with rich illustrations, also sets out the story of the
rise of different areas of Italy.
A
later display underlines the importance of Italy’s material world, with
a sexy outfit from Tom Ford’s last collection for Gucci, and a focus on
Prada’s accessories, rather than the clothes — not forgetting Fendi
furs.
The
subtext of the exhibition is the rise of Milan — home of magazine and
book publishing and of the advertising that produced the iconic
mixed-race ads from Benetton. These ads are displayed at the show, among
the work of the photographer Paolo Roversi and the Gian Paolo Barbieri
image of a Ferre white blouse, which is used as the exhibition poster.
But
is Milan now on the wane? This Italian story ends with a video debate
about Milan’s current position in fashion, including Angela Missoni,
Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri of Valentino and Franca
Sozzani, editor in chief of Vogue Italia.
It
is to the curator’s credit that the exhibition can raise questions for
the fashion cognoscenti about the state of the Italian industry, while
allowing a more general audience to appreciate La Bella Figura.
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