Puppets and marionettes always exercised a strange fascination upon me.
One thing in particular attracted me to the world of puppetry: the different attires of the various marionettes and the fact that puppet masters and their staff always tended to their costumes with loving care, almost as if their were tailors and dressmakers mending the costumes of actors and actresses.
I have seen performances in Italy by puppet company Carlo Colla & Figli (mentioned in a previous post on marionettes and puppets) that really amazed me since they displayed a terrifically maniacal attention to details and historical costumes.
A while back the company used for instance a marionette of a tailor for an episode of Giuseppe Parini’s "Il giorno" (The Day), recounting the vicissitudes of a young and pretentious lord from the 1700s.
The tailor carried two satin men’s jackets the size of a marionette in perfect mid-1700s style that featured elaborate embroideries and even tiny buttons.
This marionette perfectly symbolises for me the importance of costumes in shaping a character, a point I often highlighted in previous posts about film and fashion.
My passion for puppetry was indulged many years ago when I had the chance of doing an interview for a Scottish publication with John M. Blundall, one of the world’s leading puppet masters.
I still remember it was an absolute pleasure listening to the story of how he developed a passion for puppetry as a young kid when his parents used to take him to variety theatres and his grandmother would give him tickets to pantomimes for his birthdays. As soon as he got back home he would try and recreate the performances he had seen using paper.
Blundall’s passion grew after seeing performances by Russian puppet master Sergey Vladimirovich Obraztsova and, years later, he started designing pantomimes for the Birmingham Hyppodrome and later on moved to Liverpool.
Soon after he started working for television, as he recounted me in that occasion: “One day, out of the blue, a friend of mine who worked with Gerry Anderson in one of the very early programmes, ‘The Adventures of Twizzle and Torchy The Battery Boy’, said they were trying to develop and needed somebody who could produce figures of the quality I could produce that could stand the scrutinisation of the camera. I arrived at the end of the 'Supercar' series and then I went through to 'Fireball XL5', 'Thunderbirds' and 'Stingray', while running a course in London to train puppeteers. For the 'Thunderbirds' series I created the Parker character that became a sort of superstar all over the world, especially in Japan. I guess he became so popular because I decided to make him bloody-minded. It was great to be involved in that kind of innovative work that was still unexploited at the time and creating a sort of forerunner of what we now know as animatronics.”
Parker is not the only memorable thing in the Thunderbirds series (by the way, check out the video embedded in this post on the making of the series, to get a glimpse of the skills needed on the set).
One of the most striking thing from a fashion point of view is the peculiar shade of blue of the pilots' uniforms.
The choice of colour wasn’t casual: blue is traditionally the favoured colour for aviation and airline uniforms since it evokes the sky, but in the 60s blue was a particularly popular choice for menswear suits.
There is for example a 1965 ad for textiles made by Carlo Barbera &C. that shows on one page a Pan American plane and on the other a series of samples of blue fabrics.
“The blue shade of your dreams; the blue nuance of fantastic flights and endless horizons is the new shade of the refined 'Blanc’s' textiles made by Carlo Barbera & C. The modern elegance takes life thanks to the blue of our dreams,” the advert states.
Blue was also the favoured shade for interior design at the time.
Between the mid-50s and the 60s, architect Gio Ponti created some beautiful villas based on two shades, white and blue.
Even parts of the butterfly-shaped roof of Villa Arreaza, designed by Ponti and built in Caracas for Blanca Arreaza (the villa was demolished), were decorated using blue shades, while blue and white prevailed in all the rooms that included pieces of furniture and objects in the same nuances.
The 2010 Summer was somehow a Thunderbirds blue summer, with splashes of this peculiar shade of blue reappearing in different collections.
Kenzo's collection featured a few aqua drop crotch pants (View this photo), while Tracy Reese went for a military mood, with cerulean uniform-like sporty jumpsuits, part of a collection based on sportswear that mainly borrowed its palette from painter Pierre Bonnard.
Yet more than in the womenswear collections, shades of Thunderbirds blue made an appearance in many menswear collections for the next season.
In some collections such as Trussardi 1911, Salvatore Ferragamo and Viktor & Rolf’s, blue was limited to jackets, jumpers, shirts and shoes (View this photo) or to a pair of (aqua/electric blue) shoes and shirts (View this photo).
Tomas Maier at Bottega Veneta opted for a collection based on the tale of a man on the road, moving fast from one country to the other with a wardrobe that mixed casual and formal inspirations and that included blue suits accessorised with ample blue bags (View this photo).
Softer silhouettes gave a stylish but lighter touch to Ermenegildo Zegna’s collection based on a palette that also included shades of pale blue that seemed borrowed from its archives, matched with splashes of burnt orange or brown (View this photo).
At Roberto Cavalli’s blue suede jackets proved a safe options (View this photo) among his usual orgy of over the top animal prints in vivid colours, but other designers went for an experimental approach to blue: Walter Van Beirendonck's pale blue suits were emblazoned with words such as “Hope”, but the collection also featured blue plaid and floral jackets and trousers (View this photo).
Clare Waight Keller, creative director at Pringle of Scotland, made some interesting experiments with textiles and blue shades, wax-coating silk coats and matching different nuances of that special Thunderbirds blue one on top of the other.
Yohji Yamamoto tried instead to restore a sort of elegantly extravagant look for modern man creating a series of dandy looks that seemed inspired by the romantics and comprised also blue and aqua dandy suits.
Yet one of the first collections in which a strong shade of blue made an appearance was Jil Sander's, presented during the Pitti Uomo event in Florence.
The electric blue/neon orange invitation for the event and the blue-ish lights illuminating the gardens and the pond (View this photo) of Villa Gamberaia, in Settignano, just outside Florence, were perfect clues to the main colours - a combination of strong fluorescent shades, including bright pink, green, yellow and blue - employed by Raf Simons in this collection.
The opening look, an aqua top matched with orange trousers seemed to echo Gordon's uniforms in Thunderbirds.
Blue reappeared also in the trench coats and coats (View this photo) and was in some cases matched with tight tattoo-like stretch tops in flowery prints (View this photo).
The most striking detail of this collection, that looked particularly good in the blue coats and jackets, was the interesting pleated motif at the back (View this photo), a sort of post-modern reinterpretation of military coats.
Even the shoe soles were blue, though on closer inspection in the backstage with my Florence-based assistant Gabriele Semeraro, who also took some pictures of the shoe details (View this photo), I found out that the blue soles were actually only painted (a rather good idea if you want to renovate a pair of old shoes, just get a spray can and enjoy yourself by spraying some solid colours on the soles!).
Among all the Spring/Summer 2011 collections, only Prada's went for the uniform approach.
Blue shades were indeed employed to recreate different 'uniforms': shirts evoked office workers; jumpers called to mind a sailor's attire and cotton tops with one pocket on the chest reminded of surgeon's uniforms.
Blue appeared in different nuances, from light to navy and turquoise and even in the subtle blue lines decorating the rubber soles of the espadrilles (not sprayed on in this case...).
We will have to wait for a few more weeks before discovering if this shade will be a must also in womenswear collections for the next Summer.
In the meantime, enjoy spotting further Thunderbirds blue references in the menswear Spring/Summer 2011 collections.
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Non so perchè ma mi piace troppo questo articolo!!! :):)
Posted by: Gabriele | August 15, 2010 at 09:48 PM