Look at the following adverts – the first, Gianni Versace for Callaghan, is dated 1974, the Yves Saint Laurent one is instead from 1976. Would you be able to point out the main difference between these pages taken from Italian editions of prominent fashion magazines, and modern adverts?
Yes, you got it: the names of the textile manufacturers (Tessibaldi and Tessuti Bini) and of the yarn mill (Lane Grawitz) appear in both cases. We already dedicated a post to this issue a while back, highlighting how, in the past, adverts often bore the names of the producers that had collaborated to a specific collection to acknowledge their contribution. Sadly, this doesn't happen anymore, in fact things have even become more confusing when it comes to acknowledging the source of specific materials employed in a collection.
There is indeed no transparency when it comes to the textiles and yarns employed by many fashion designers and, while you perfectly understand why some people would like to behave in a secretive way to avoid being copied, there are at times some puzzling situations.
Let's take for example Stella Jean: the young and hip Italian designer is known for her African print dresses favoured by the upper bourgeoisie of Milan (more or less the same people that most times despise African immigrants clad in the same fabrics and working in Italy...) and for her T-shirts with posters of Italian films from the '60s (that may land her in one of those complicated legal quandaries about copyright infringements involving images of celebrities, names of directors and posters by specific illustrators that we'd rather not think about...).
It is not a secret that Stella Jean uses Vlisco fabrics in her designs, yet this is not acknowledged in any place.
Visiting the Stella Jean stand at the Pitti Bimbo fair (held in June) you were indeed told that those were African textiles, but, "not all of them", even though the garments bore just one label stating "Made in Italy", but not one reference to the place where the fabrics came from (most of them were distinctively Vlisco ones).
There are actually further misunderstandings and confusions about the fabrics of these designs (currently favoured by Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani, quite often seen in full or pencil skirts or dresses in Dutch wax fabrics perfectly projecting residues of a colonial past into the future): according to an article on The Telegraph, Stella Jean's fabrics are handwoven in Burkina Faso, but you actually wonder which ones are actually handwoven in Burkina Faso since the Vlisco site states the fabrics are made in the Netherlands since 1846; another question that comes to your mind is why the inside label of the clothes doesn't indicate that they are "Made in Italy" using African or Dutch fabrics (what would be so shameful about it, when Viktor & Rolf used red carpet by Dutch manufacturer Desso in their Autumn/Winter 2014-15 Haute Couture collection and acknowledged it?).
It is perfectly understandable that the designer in question may not want us to know where the fabrics for her most popular and most vibrantly rich designs come from Vlisco as ordinary people may buy them from the Internet and recreate the same designs at a more affordable price. But there are some points to make here: boasting about using their fabrics wouldn't be a bad idea since they are high quality textiles and Vlisco has even got an Atelier page that highlights the collaborations between the company and international boutiques or designers.
Maybe Stella Jean wouldn't need to keep the source of her fabrics secret if the cut of her designs were a bit more original and complicated and weren't simply derived from '50s silhouettes (a point of concern as, in the long run, people may start thinking she's a one-trick pony).
Most designs for the children's collection presented at Pitti Bimbo in June were indeed simple and linear mini-derivations of Stella Jean's current womenswear collection and were mainly made with Vlisco's bird-printed fabric known in some countries as "Air Afrique" and even amateur dressmakers may be able to come up with a basic yet ample elasticated skirt for a child.
Maybe to make her pieces more unique, Stella Jean may try and develop a limited edition range of fabrics with Vlisco itself, considering also that the solid consistency of the textiles she uses is the key to the rigid shapes of many of her creations.
Many other prominent designers – and artists as well such as Yinka Shonibare – have so far incorporated Vlisco fabrics in their garments and accessories acknowledging it and, while it's perfectly understandable how the passionate Stella Jean who is half-Italian and half-Haitian wants to pay homage to her identity and roots via the textiles in her pieces, it seems also silly that she may not want to acknowledge on the label of her garments the real manufacturers - be they African or Dutch - of the textiles she uses.
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