Pascal Gautrand and the art of being unique

In a previous post on Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard I wrote about the painstakingly difficult process that allowed tailor Umberto Tirelli to create the shirts worn by the Garibaldini soldiers in the film. The tailor reproduced the uniqueness of the soldiers’ uniforms by assigning ten different dressmakers the job of making 30 different shirts each.

It was almost impossible for me not to think about this story when I first heard about Pascal Gautrand’s project.

The French freelance designer specialised in Textile Conception and Design at Roubaix's ESSAT and with a master in Fashion and Design Management at the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris, developed in the last few years various projects involving also photography, video and installations.

In February Gautrand organised a rather peculiar exhibition at the Rome-based Valentina Moncada Gallery.

Gautrand asked 30 Rome-based “camiciai” (shirt-makers) to make the same shirt basing their design on a man’s shirt bought at Zara's.

This mass-produced item inspired 30 shirts, all very different one from the other.

Gautrand also created a sort of map of shirt-makers tracing an itinerary through Rome that can lead a visitor to the doorstep of 30 tailors, from Angelo Cenci to Sergio Nesci, passing through Battistoni, Borrelli and Franco Litrico (you can find the entire list of tailors here).

While working on this project, Gautrand met shirt-maker Roberto Marino and together they settled onto creating a special collaboration launching a brand, Made in Roma, producing unique men’s shirts.

Question: Rome lost its fame of "tailoring capital" in the last few years, what inspired you to try and re-launch the local made-to-measure industry?
Pascal Gautrand: I arrived in Rome around a year ago, but I have been working for ten years now on fashion projects about the process of standardisation, a theme I have also tackled in a recent installation of 18 dummies made of fabrics, unique pieces produced in series by a group of 20 students from the Lycée Paul Poiret in Paris. Many years ago we had some fantastic tailors and dressmakers in France and it was possible to have your own clothes made to measure. As the years passed everything changed and things were reduced down to two different markets, prêt-à-porter and luxury, though the latter is only accessible to a limited part of our society. In Italy people are lucky because there is still somehow a tailoring culture, though it needs to be regenerated.

Question: What makes the Made in Roma shirts unique?
Pascal Gautrand: A shirt for a man is even more important than a pair of trousers or a coat, as it symbolises the essence of masculinity. We worked on the proportions of the collar and picked up the fabrics carefully, creating clashes between button down and tuxedo shirts or adding patchwork inserts. Roberto makes 14 shirts a day and the prices are rather affordable for such a unique item (€160). Another unique yet quirky detail is the motto that we hid in the inside part of the collar and that refers to three popular sayings about Rome – “Rome wasn’t build in a day”, “All roads take to Rome” and “When in Rome, do as Romans do”.

Question: What’s the aim of the Made in Roma designs?
Pascal Gautrand: We have lost knowledge of the production, we don’t know where what we wear comes from, what kind of work goes on behind it or how long does it take to make it nor who are the people who make our clothes. These concepts have become irrelevant, we just get into a shop and find everything we need, while, when
someone chooses to have an item made to measure, a sort of bond is
established between that person and the artisan creating that specific
item. Trying to understand what goes on behind what we wear would help us all understanding better what we wear and taking the craftsmanship aspect of production back into fashion. This is what we aim to do with the Made in Roma label.

"Il lato invisibile della moda" (The Invisible Side of Fashion), an exhibition by Pascal Gautrand divided in three parts, started yesterday at Milan’s Centre culturel français and will be open to the public until 20th October 2009.

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