Sometimes I find it hard getting excited about Italian designers. This mainly happens for one reason, a comparison I often make in my mind between what would happen in the early days, when the first Italian designers were creating their collections and what happens now.
Reading about those times, talking to the designers from those years or researching about particular aspects of early designs, you realise that fashion was then the result of a joint effort made by reuniting together different disciplines, such as painting, sculpting, architecture, interior design, set and costume design and even philosophy.
Like art, fashion was supposed to stir emotions, and was analysed as a complex system of signs generated by putting together shapes, silhouettes and harmonious geometrical forms.
Fashion wasn’t therefore conceived as a pile of clothes and accessories, but it was a concept filed under the ‘means of communication’ label; it was a tool that could help decoding the emotions of the single human beings and of the entire society.
So fashion wasn’t treated as a collection of superfluous garments and accessories shown in the pages of trend magazines as “must haves”, but as a special form of art that could communicate something to people through the work of different artists who collaborated together.
It's not rare to see fashion designers collaborating with artists nowadays, but it wasn’t rare then to see artists designing clothes and accessories, something that doesn’t happen so often at the moment.
What made me ponder about such themes was this gold, lapis lazuli and coral necklace (see first image in this post) by Italian artist Gianni Novak.
Born in Perugia in 1933, a friend of writer Ivan Arnaldi, Novak mainly worked as a painter and illustrator.
His work was characterised by geometric and post-modernist shapes in which human forms could at times be detected.
The necklace in the first picture in this post was supposed to be a sort of amulet, characterised by motifs that, in some ways, called to mind the illustrations Novak did for the tarot cards for Alitalia in 1973 (second image in this post).
Novak’s necklace has been constantly on my mind in the last few days and I tried to look for contemporary pieces that, combining art with fashion, could somehow remind me of Novak’s work.
There are echoes of Novak’s vision in Lanvin’s cumbersome and futuristic necklaces from the Autumn/Winter 2009-10 collection, in particular in the necklaces with large metal plates decorated with oversized pearls and sparkling gems.
But I also found a certain resemblance to Novak’s piece in Marion Vidal’s designs.
Vidal studied architecture in Paris and Milan before moving to Antwerp and enrolling in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
The designer launched her own brand five years ago and, since then, she has been creating oversized pieces in which different materials – wood, ceramics, silver and even textiles – happily co-exist together.
There is something in Vidal’s Autumn 2009 collection that calls back to mind Novak’s necklace, especially the shapes, different materials employed and the combination of metallic fan-like motifs (that almost betrays an Art Deco influence) with planet or atom-looking spheres.
Also the geometric shapes in Holly Fulton's necklaces – mentioned in a previous post in comparison with Eduardo Paolozzi's works – remind me in some cases of Novak's necklace.
Having struck this comparison between Novak and contemporary designers, I would now like to find artists who also create exclusive fashion pieces, like Novak did.
I think it would be really refreshing to see something slightly less trendy and maybe more timeless like a work of art appearing on a catwalk.
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