The end of the year is near and calendar mania is, as usual, predictably rife.
I quite like notebooks, but I have a sort of personal aversion for calendars and diaries as I see them as constrictive tools that try to organise one's space and life (while it's so much more creative living surrounded by chaos...).
Anyway there is a calendar or a diary which I would definitely buy though for the time being it only exists in my imagination.
It's a calendar that could tell me what was fashionable on a precise day of the year fifty, sixty or even eighty years ago.
Since such a thing is not available at the moment, I often leaf through old magazines trying to rediscover forgotten designs that were popular decades ago.
Apart from teaching you quite a bit about the history of fashion design, leafing through vintage magazines can also make you realise how specific designs are still trendy today or, if slightly updated, could be definitely re-launched.
Today I picked the 29th October 1961 issue of Italian weekly Oggi and rediscovered through the main fashion feature published in its pages what was fashionable at the time.
The main fashion spread is about Germana Marucelli, an Italian designer I have mentioned here and there in this blog for her connection with the art world.
According to Milan-based Marucelli, the trend for the Autumn/Winter 1961-62 season favoured soft lines.
Dresses featured asymmetrical motifs (and asymmetrical prints) or wrap over details; tartan and plaid coats were characterised by simple lines and silhouettes while skirt suits featured pleated or panelled skirts matched with short or cropped jackets.
Marucelli opted for soft and warm fabrics to make these designs, choosing a type of fabric that was called at the time “Fiesta”.
The latter was a wool and terital (a polyester based fabric) blend created by the Marzotto Group that was supposed to be as soft as flannel and as resistant as terital and was available in different shades, from green to bronze, charcoal grey, deep sea blue and eggplant violet.
This fabric was available also in its pleated version and that was one of the main reasons why it was favoured by women who didn't have great dressmaking skills, since it allowed to easily create skirts and dresses.
There is a skirt Marucelli designed and that was featured in this photoshoot (worn by the model on the right in the third picture in this post) that featured two different types of "Fiesta", the pleated one and the smooth one.
Marucelli used the two fabrics to create a sort of pannier like skirt with a frontal panel characterised by a geometrical and almost architectural motif that seemed to jut out around the hip area.
While looking at this image I thought it was a rather unusual design.
The picture made me wonder in which ways this motif could be recreated in contemporary fashion.
Then I thought about Acne's well defined and precisely cut strapless denim dress with an architectural wrap around panel and realised that, maybe, what was fashionable almost 50 years ago can still be fashionable today.
I guess the secret is just looking at old designs with a more experimental and cutting edge vision.
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