Magazines and sites always dedicate ample space to (often rather ridiculous...) Christmas and New Year’s Eve looks.
Rather than suggesting you what to wear tonight, I’d like to close this year with a 1963 sketch by Italian illustrator Brunetta showing a chic and elegant design by Givenchy that wouldn’t look out of place at a New Year’s Eve party.
The design included a top with a satin ruffled motif around the breasts matched with a black chenille jupe fourreau decorated around the waist with a diamond and pearl brooch.
The look was completed by a toque hat with a cascade of black ostrich feathers on one side. The sketch actually looks very modern and almost anticipates Lanvin’s current creations.
Fashion critic and journalist Maria Pezzi (mentioned here and there in previous posts) once stated that Brunetta had a sort of “third eye”, a special "laser sight" that helped her scanning the collections she saw and capture in her sketches and illustrations their essence, turning even the most ordinary characters into extraordinary figures.
Considered a genius by Carmel Snow and praised by Pierre Cardin who once organised for her an exhibition, Brunetta had a rather unique personality, considered by many as a strange melange of good and evil, a combination of dark humour, kindness, vitriolic aggression and sensitivity (just one of the many reasons why I love her...).
One day Pezzi told Brunetta that her sketches often ended up looking more authentic than the ones made by the fashion designers who created those looks and the illustrator simply replied that her eyes were a bit like lenses that allowed her to see the most unusual and hidden details.
Maria Pezzi once met her at a menswear event in a gallery where designs by Gianfranco Ferré were displayed by young male models posing as dummies. Rather than drawing them, Brunetta was working on sketches of the visitors, “Look at them,” she told the journalist, “they don’t even know they are naked in front of me and that I can see their wants, desires and craves.”
I really wish there was a contemporary illustrator who, like witty Brunetta, would still be able to capture the real essence of fashion and style and would be able to inject some much needed irony into our very fake fashion industry. Enjoy the sketch - I hope it will put you in the right mood to party!
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