Sonia Delaunay in a Ferragamo shop window |

The 1900s were great times for the interchange between art and fashion.

Indeed couturiers often turned to the world of arts and used its main themes, prints and inspirations in their design.

Artists and designers started collaborating together, sparkling through their innovative work new styles, attitudes and trends.

Painter Sonia Delaunay experimented with what she defined as simultaneous clothing and suggested new decorative solutions through her striking fabric designs and embroidered and patchwork techniques that combined different threads and materials in geometric designs and patterns.

Her fabrics were essentially an explosion of colours and her dresses were characterised by a simplified cut that helped highlighting the colourful patterns.

Delaunay also wrote the essay L’influence de la peinture sur la mode in which she analysed the mechanism behind chromatic perception and the relationship between different colour options.

In the fashion world Salvatore Ferragamo could be compared to Sonia Delaunay. By combining luxurious skins – from suede to kangaroo, snake and crocodile – he created unique patchworks of textures for his footwear or arranged differently coloured squares of suede and leather in geometrical patterns, exploring revolutionary colour combinations (see first pic in this post).

The Delaunay-Ferragamo connection has recently been rediscovered: some vintage shoe models by Ferragamo have indeed been re-launched by the Florentine maison and the Florence-based shop (Via dei Tornabuoni 2) also boasts in its window a black coat with a colourful Delaunay-like lining (that reminds me in a way of Schiaparelli's Harlequin coat), as you can see from the second pic in this post.