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While doing a personal research on fashion design, I came across a picture of Roberta di Camerino's 'sketch' for her 1950s college dress.

As you may remember from a previous post, the Italian designer didn't actually use to sketch her creations on paper, but she actually painted her designs on canvases, as if they were proper works of art.

Some of the pictures of Roberta di Camerino's sketches I posted a few months ago looked like proper paintings: the dresses sketched were coloured in and this added to the designs a certain three-dimensionality.

Yet I found the sketch for the college dress minimally interesting since no colour was added and pockets, a belt and a pleated skirt were just drawn on the canvas together with a few instructions scribbled aside.

This sketch actually reminded me a bit of Hussein Chalayan's "Airmail Dress", the design conceived as a red and blue A3 airmail envelope that folded out becoming a full-length dress that also featured instructions for folding and fitting it.

The design, created ten years ago and currently exhibited at the "Art of Fashion" event in Rotterdam, was a symbol of absence and presence and perfectly embodied the theme of travel.

Though the two designs are different – after all Roberta di Camerino's was a sketch, so it wasn't meant to be actually worn, and it was done over 50 years ago – I can find a few similarities between them.

First of all the instructions, almost quickly scribbled down on the canvas in Roberta di Camerino's case while perfectly printed on the dress in Chalayan's design; second Roberta di Camerino's usually created trompe l'oeil pieces, so the pleats, pockets and belts would have been just drawn on the final dress, creating the illusion those features really existed; in the same way Chalayan's created in this case an illusion – 'is the dress actually a paper envelope or is the envelope actually a dress?' many will wonder.

Besides, both the sketch and the dress are flattened out and would only achieve a sense of three-dimensionality when/if actually worn.

I think it's a shame the team at Roberta di Camerino never thought about doing T-shirts or dresses with prints of the original sketches: I think they would have been definitely more interesting, engaging and a tad more avant-garde than many other things out there at the moment.  

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