In yesterday’s post I mentioned fashion illustrator and set/costume designer Lila de Nobili and, since this year it’s the tenth anniversary of her death, let’s rediscover her work in this post.
Born in Lugano in 1916 from an Italian father and a Jewish-Hungarian mother, Lila de Nobili was introduced to the world of drawing through her uncle, high fashion artist Marcel Vertès.
In the 1930s, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome with Ferruccio Ferrazzi and Aristide Sartorio, but left the Italian capital after it was bombed in 1943, settling in Paris.
At the end of the war de Nobili started working for Vogue, creating beautiful covers and drawings for the fashion magazine, together with another Italian artist and costume designer, Giulio Coltellacci.
She also did illustrations for Hermès and created the dreamy and stylish adverts for Lucien Lelong’s fragrances.
As the years passed, de Nobili moved onto costume and set design: introduced to the world of theatre by the French actress Françoise Lugagne, a childhood friend and the wife of the director Raymond Rouleau, she created costumes for Rouleau’s works including Angel Pavement (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire (1949), Anna Karenine (1951), Gigi (1951), Cyrano de Bergerac (1953) and The Aspern Papers (1961).
In the ‘50s de Nobili started working with Luchino Visconti creating in 1955 the sets and costumes for La Traviata at La Scala and dressing Maria Callas as Violetta, and, the following year designing sets and costumes for the ballet Mario and the Magician, based on the short story by Thomas Mann.
In La Traviata de Nobili’s work was particularly important as the oppressive and rigid luxury of the sets and costumes had to hint at the hypocrisy and cynicism of the main characters.
Like Piero Tosi, de Nobili recreated in her work imagined spaces in a realistic key, thanks to her great attention to details (Greek painter Yannis Tsarouchis was astonished when he saw de Nobili painting all her sets by herself in the ‘50s).
Further theatre, opera, ballet and films followed in the late 1950s and early '60s, including Babilée's Sable (1956), Peter Hall's Cymbeline (1957), Franco Zeffirelli's Mignon (1957), Orphée (1958), Hall's Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1958), Ondine (1959), Raymond Rouleau’s Ruy Blas (1960), Gian Carlo Menotti's La Bohème (1960), Falstaff (1961), Zeffirelli's Aida (1962) and Rigoletto (1963), Babilée's Le Roi des gourmets (1964), Love for Love (1965), Seule dans le noir (1966), Ettore Giannini’s Il mercante di Venezia (1966), The Royal Ballet's production of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beauty (1968) and sets for Manon Lescaut (1973).
De Nobili also collaborated to films such as Raymond Rouleau's Les sorcières de Salem (1957), Michel Boisrond's Amours célèbres (1961; in this case she created the costumes with Monique Dunan and Georges Wakhevitch) and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) by Tony Richardson.
Some of her costumes for Ondine and The Sleeping Beauty are still part of the Royal Opera House collections, though one of de Nobili’s most interesting designs for The Sleeping Beauty is part of the Victoria & Albert Museum collection.
This production of the ballet, staged by Peter Wright, after Marius Petipa's 1890 original production, was set in the medieval period rather than in the Renaissance as imagined by Petipa and by the composer Tchaikovsky.
This task was particularly difficult for de Nobili as she had to create something completely new that would have appealed audiences who were more familiar with Oliver Messel's most famous 1946 production.
De Nobili opted for a sort of artistocratic and elegant look created mixing antique parts of period dresses with contemporary cheaper trims.
One of the women's hunting costumes used in Act II of the ballet still looks absolutely striking as it features a stiff bodice borrowed from fencing uniforms, ample sleeves, and a decostructed skirt.
The V&A archive description for this item states that it featured “heraldic symbols in traditional and 'new' materials – the felt appliques of the 1950s mixing with the adhesives and resins for the fleur de lys. The muted browns and blues suggested autumnal shades reflecting the fallow years of Princess Aurora's sleep.”
In the ‘70s de Nobili retired in Paris where she taught painting and where she died in 2002, at the age of 86.
While it is possible to find further information about Lila de Nobili and her works in books about Milan’s La Scala Theatre and Luchino Visconti or in volumes about fashion and early French Vogue covers, the best places where you can rediscover her work are probably the archives of museums and dance-related institutions that still preserve costumes by de Nobili.
Hopefully de Nobili’s work will still inspire further fashion illustrators to work also in other fields including set and costume design.
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When talking about costume design, I can’t help but remember the designs of Lila de Nobili; especially the Snow White dress.
The best locations where you can uncover her perform are probably the records of museums and dance-related organizations that still protect outfits by de Nobili.
Interesting post and thanks for sharing. Some things in here I have not thought about before.Its really useful information.