From Hollywood style to catwalk couture
ITALY’S box-fresh premier, Matteo Renzi, heads the country’s 62nd government since WWII, its fourth since 2011. Italian politics may be a scandal-fest that makes Europe grin like a patronising sibling (when not frowning at the economic chaos), but when it comes to food, art, cars and especially to fashion, we’ll still have what they’re having. In a perfect world, it seems, everything but the government would be labelled “Made in Italy”.
The Glamour of Italian Fashion began at a time when nobody felt that way. Curator Sonnet Stanfill brings visitors back to the physically and spiritually depleted Italy of 1945 with images of a Florentine bomb site. The government and other players in the business community felt that fashion could help spur economic recovery. A lot of Marshall Fund dollars’ were spent on retooling tanneries and textile factories. In this first room, Ms Stanfill shines a light on Giovanni Battista Giorgini, a visionary entrepreneur who convinced international buyers and press to come to Italy’s first fashion shows. These were initially held in Giorgini’s home but in 1952 he moved them to Sala Bianca, a chandelier-lit hall at Palazzo Pitti, Florence. The venue showcased new-season fashions until they migrated to Milan (which is closer to key textile manufacturers), in the 1970s.
