Architect Carlo Scarpa started working in 1969 on a monumental tomb for the Brion family at San Vito di Altivole (near Asolo). The tomb, completed in 1978, is considered as his masterpiece: concrete, glass, steel, mosaics, water, grass and cypresses were employed to create a sense of conceptual richness and rigour.
Rough, unfinished concrete was carved, moulded, framed and cut away to design contrasting yet complementing forms with verdant gardens, the same effect that you may see also in Scarpa's sculpture garden inside the Central Pavilion of the Giardini in Venice.
Scarpa favoured very simple yet powerful shapes and geometrical articulations that were characterised by a lack of complexity, but represented the culmination of a harmonious marriage of forms and materials that, brought together, engaged in a dialogue.
Carlo Scarpa and this conversation between different materials and concepts were the main inspirations behind Brendan Mullane's Spring/Summer 2016 menswear collection for Brioni.
The Creative Director included technical fabrics such as parachute-nylon (seen also on the Jil Sander and Z Zegna runways during men’s fashion week in Milan) and more conventional textiles in the collection, colliding the urban and utilitarian with the tailored.
Silhouettes were precisely cut with suit, leather and safari jackets belted at the waist and matched with trousers or knee-length shorts. The palette mainly focused on greys and blues and variation was added to these minimally sophisticated moods via suede patch pockets or hand-painted/hand-screened opaque gold, teal, green, blue or occasional red stripes or brush strokes that formed the trademark grids of De Stijl's art and architecture.
These motifs were maybe hints at the fact that Scarpa's abstract composition language was inspired by different movements including De Stijl, but they also called to mind his layered compositions such as his intervention in the Castelvecchio di Verona museum with the glass layers added to the window openings (echoing Piet Mondrian's paintings).
Parachute Japanese nylon parkas were another reference to Scarpa's love of Eastern culture (the Brion tomb looks more like an oriental temple than a traditional chapel...), while fine-knit T-shirts with printed lines or decorated with three-dimensional motifs could maybe be considered as references to blueprints.
Scarpa is usually remembered and admired for his ability to integrate his design process into the flux of tradition and history, but also for his capacity to allow different elements to co-exist in a non-hierarchical layering of planes.
It therefore becomes easy to understand why Scarpa and his smooth and fine works are still relevant nowadays not just to many contemporary artists and architects, but to fashion designers as well who may be looking for strategies to combine history, memory (think about Brioni's heritage in this case...) and modern moods and find new ways to let them co-exist in one design.
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