Translated by
Nicola Mira
Revealed
November 7, 2024
Influential Italian artwork critic Gillo Dorfles as soon as labelled Elio Fiorucci as “the Duchamp of Italian fashion.” To study concerning the many alternative sides of the bubbling, offbeat Italian designer, his aficionados can now go to Milan’s Triennale design museum, which is dedicating a significant exhibition to this widespread style icon and ground-breaking, versatile designer, who died in 2015. The Fiorucci retrospective, the primary of its form, is open till March 16. It’s an thrilling, experiential exhibition, unveiling a number of hitherto unpublished paperwork about Elio Fiorucci himself, his character and work.
Elio Fiorucci in Nineteen Seventies Milan – Triennale Milano
The exhibition incorporates a wealth of images, drawings, movies, sound recordings, installations, devices, and naturally garments and equipment. The recordings notably embrace extracts from the 17-hour audio biography which Elio Fiorucci recorded aged 80. They are often listened to through the phone handsets and outdated cassette recorders scattered across the exhibition, as if Fiorucci himself was privately recounting his life story to the exhibition’s guests.
The organisers have been capable of supply materials from different archives belonging to a few of Fiorucci’s collaborators, and particularly to his household and his label, which was acquired in 2022 by Swiss businesswoman Dona Bertarelli, through her household workplace. The paperwork enable guests a glimpse of lesser-known cases of Fiorucci’s previous, mixing three separate threads: a extra non-public, casual journey following the designer’s personal voice, his enterprise and cultural actions, and his style.
“It’s not an exhibition about fashion, but about ‘fashionology’, meaning all the ecosystems flourishing around the fashion industry that allowed Elio Fiorucci to have fun, improvise, and add to his work. Through a series of encounters and projects, he created an entirely new way of engaging with fashion,” stated Judith Clark, the exhibition’s curator, chatting with FashionNetwork.com.
Stickers and scratch playing cards distributed by the Fiorucci label within the Nineteen Seventies – ph DM
Recreation of Elio Fiorucci’s workplace – ph DM
In 1976, when Fiorucci opened his first retailer in Milan, introducing Italy to the uber-successful Swinging London type through an unprecedented vary of garments, equipment, devices, trinkets, drinks and so forth., he successfully invented the concept-store components.
In 1976, he opened one other revolutionary retailer in through Torino in Milan, that includes an area for reside performances and a restaurant open till 2 a.m., the latter an absolute first within the metropolis. The Triennale exhibition exhibits the entire design course of for the restaurant, right down to sketches for the menu. The identical brightly colored pop-art vibe was adopted for the duvet graphics of the corporate’s 1976 monetary report, adorned with the design of an aeroplane flying over a Mediterranean panorama with a glowing sky within the backdrop.
One of many exhibition’s most attention-grabbing finds is the part on ‘Fiorucci Dxing’, an experimental venture specializing in picture analysis, through which the designer’s employees studied anthropology, up to date developments, and thinkers and philosophers like Theodor W. Adorno and Roland Barthes. “They also shot videos of what they saw during their worldwide travels. This research project was the label’s creative heart. Behind [Fiorucci’s] pop-art objects and graphics, there was depth, thinking, and a message,” concluded Cherstich.
