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  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    An NYT article on Italian Fashion



    Great article IMO, completely corresponds to what I've been thinking about Italy.


    Italian Fashion in the Time of the Trollop











    Milan




    IN Italy nobody drives in the slow lane, colloquially called the
    lane of shame. So it?s somewhat of a mystery why the Italian fashion
    industry, one of the primary engines of the Italian economy, continues
    to putter along year after year doing 50 while China, Eastern Europe,
    India and ? aesthetically if not economically ? even France go whizzing
    past.




    In terms of volume of production, Italy remains a force, one
    illustration of this being the sheer scope of the seasonal fashion
    weeks here. No fewer than 228 runway shows are noted in Milan?s
    official seven-day calendar; a free fashion handout thicker than a
    ?Bleak House? paperback lists 61 solidly packed pages of showrooms that
    are open to buyers and the press.




    Yet to be honest, there are no more than a handful of shows that
    anyone cares about or that the ever-expanding posse of international
    press and buyers has come to Milan eager to see.




    At this point there is Bottega Veneta. There is Jil Sander. There is
    Prada. There is Gucci. (Maybe also Marni.) Two of these are designed by
    Italians (the others are designed by a German and a Belgian,
    respectively), and at this point Miuccia Prada is as ambivalent about
    national identity as one can be and still qualify for a passport.
    Beginning last year, Ms. Prada made even clearer the shakiness of her
    allegiance to what?s termed the Italian fashion system when she packed
    up her Miu Miu show and started staging it in Paris.




    What happened? Designers like Armani, whose brands are now global
    behemoths, once also dominated the aesthetic side of the fashion
    business. Why does Italy seem like it was run off the road?




    ?Italy has a big, big problem, which is that there is no
    generational change,? said Ennio Capasa, the designer of Costume
    National, a respected but largely commercial label that is, in typical
    eccentric fashion, commemorating its 21st anniversary this year.
    ?Designwise, factorywise, in terms of the bureaucracy, we?re behind.?




    It is not just, as many suggest, that Italy, long renowned for its
    textiles, its handcrafts and its high aesthetic standards, has lost
    large hunks of its manufacturing market to Eastern Europe, China and
    India. Plenty of people here will tell you that the China experiment
    has not necessarily worked out. Cheap foreign copies of Italian luxury
    goods are fine, but not fine enough, apparently, to satisfy the trained
    eyes and high expectations of people spoiled by the access they?ve
    always had to the best artisans around, workers whose skills have been
    transmitted across centuries.




    You don?t hear the word used explicitly, but the quality missing
    from fashion here now is what Italians refer to as raffinatezza, or
    refinement. This is not a small detail in a country historically
    defined almost entirely by its visual culture. What has replaced it in
    part is the tackiness and vulgarity of which America once claimed the
    dominant market share. American pop culture at this point is largely
    vapid and formless. What is Paris Hilton but a cloud of pastel
    ectoplasm, its molecules barely sticky enough to hold form?




    Italian pop culture produces its own manifestations, one being the
    careers of the designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, whose
    status as media deities owes less to their design skills than to their
    genius for tapping into a youth culture just as dumb as its American
    counterpart but visually definable in terms of hardness, or what?s
    called here durezza.




    Let other designers make clothes that look chic or classy. Dolce
    & Gabbana seems satisfied to have built a nearly $1 billion
    privately owned company on the sartorial wisdom of the ragazzi, the
    street kids, dressing a generation that, as is often reported, reads
    perhaps a book a year and watches more television daily (240 minutes on
    average) than almost any other similar population in Europe.




    It was the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini who first pronounced doom
    on Italy?s aesthetic and moral standards based on the decadence he saw
    emanating from the boob tube. But that was eons before the former prime
    minister Silvio Berlusconi
    created his mediagarchy, before Domenico and Stefano became television
    regulars, before the country?s biggest porn star, Rocco Siffredi,
    became a snack foods huckster featured in commercials for Amica potato
    chips whose tag line uses a double entrendre that is slang for a part
    of the female anatomy.




    Like most eggheads of the period, Pasolini decried the vulgarization
    of culture by the ubiquitous new medium. Yet in Pasolini?s day, Italy
    could still be said to have a vital literary, artistic and cinematic
    scene to counter the television?s evil rays. Even the applied forms
    like fashion then embodied an image of Italy as a holdout of refined
    tradition and Italians as the guardians and arbiters of patrician ways.




    That this fantasy has not altogether faded can be seen in the press
    obsession with Lapo Elkann, reprobate grandson of Gianni Agnelli, the
    former Fiat chief. Despite repeated drug binges, stints in rehab, his
    overdose in the apartment of a middle-aged transvestite, Mr. Elkann is
    invariably seen as a paragon of elegance. Mostly this is because he
    wears his grandfather?s clothes.




    There is a particularly Italian message in the fact that, no matter
    what kind of antics Mr. Elkann gets up to, his inherited hand-me-downs
    possess the magical power to restore him to moral rectitude.




    It?s this raffinatezza that seems to have gone, either leaving the
    country or ignored by designers whose idea of fashion is a
    leopard-print frock for a trollop-slash-starlet or the 99th iteration
    of whiskered jeans.




    ?I?m not sure it will ever come back,? Mr. Capasa of Costume
    National said, referring to the refinement of Italian fashion and the
    sense of Italy as a generator of style and innovative ideas. ?At the
    top level of power, there are just a few brands left,? and, he added,
    very little space left for either traditional labels or new blood.




    ?They have to embrace the future,? Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor,
    said at the Armani show on Monday, referring to the Camera Nazionale,
    the trade group that regulates the Italian fashion industry. Slow to
    promote novelty or young designers, the group has been accused of being
    old-fashioned, resistant, entrenched.




    ?There are wonderful, talented people here, but it?s always the
    same names,? Ms. Wintour said. ?Where is the support? Where is the
    sponsorship? You have to embrace the future of fashion and look for the
    next generation.?




    And if that doesn?t happen, it is no stretch to imagine a day when
    the fast-lane folks who run global fashion will decide to skip the
    Milan exit in their haste to find the next great place.



    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine
  • laika
    moderator
    • Sep 2006
    • 3787

    #2
    Re: An NYT article on Italian Fashion



    I thought this article was great--really excellent observations. I'm curious as to why Italy in particular is lacking a new generation of designers, though. Especially when Spain--which is frequently stereotyped as being old world--gives us people like Txell Miras.



    I absolutely love this part:



    "That this fantasy has not altogether faded can be seen in the press
    obsession with Lapo Elkann, reprobate grandson of Gianni Agnelli, the
    former Fiat chief. Despite repeated drug binges, stints in rehab, his
    overdose in the apartment of a middle-aged transvestite, Mr. Elkann is
    invariably seen as a paragon of elegance. Mostly this is because he
    wears his grandfather?s clothes.




    There is a particularly Italian message in the fact that, no matter
    what kind of antics Mr. Elkann gets up to, his inherited hand-me-downs
    possess the magical power to restore him to moral rectitude."



    It says more about Italian culture than the rest of the article put together. And it's all about clothes!

    ...I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

    Comment

    • Faust
      kitsch killer
      • Sep 2006
      • 37852

      #3
      Re: An NYT article on Italian Fashion

      [quote user="laika"]

      I thought this article was great--really excellent observations. I'm curious as to why Italy in particular is lacking a new generation of designers, though. Especially when Spain--which is frequently stereotyped as being old world--gives us people like Txell Miras.



      I absolutely love this part:



      "That this fantasy has not altogether faded can be seen in the press
      obsession with Lapo Elkann, reprobate grandson of Gianni Agnelli, the
      former Fiat chief. Despite repeated drug binges, stints in rehab, his
      overdose in the apartment of a middle-aged transvestite, Mr. Elkann is
      invariably seen as a paragon of elegance. Mostly this is because he
      wears his grandfather?s clothes.




      There is a particularly Italian message in the fact that, no matter
      what kind of antics Mr. Elkann gets up to, his inherited hand-me-downs
      possess the magical power to restore him to moral rectitude."



      It says more about Italian culture than the rest of the article put together. And it's all about clothes!



      [/quote]



      Yes, it's beautiful!



      I love Trebay's writing - so scathing, lol. He's totally on point though.

      Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

      StyleZeitgeist Magazine

      Comment

      • sbw4224
        Senior Member
        • Sep 2006
        • 571

        #4
        Re: An NYT article on Italian Fashion



        Great article. I also love how pointed he his with his words. I also found this interesting:



        ?Italy has a big, big problem, which is that there is no
        generational change,? said Ennio Capasa, the designer of Costume
        National, a respected but largely commercial label that is, in typical
        eccentric fashion, commemorating its 21st anniversary this year.
        ?Designwise, factorywise, in terms of the bureaucracy, we?re behind.?



        It kind of goes along with what has been discussed before with garments being made in developing countries.

        Comment

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