If you lecture in universities and colleges where they teach fashion design, but at the same time you get a chance to go to runway shows, you are trapped in a schizophrenic situation. You tell students to be original and develop their own identities while prompting them to find new and innovative ways to express their creativity; then you go to a catwalk show and you do not just see the past being endlessly remixed, but you also witness multiple copyright infringements happening on the runways of the world.
During Paris Fashion Week "Rescue 112", Andreas Kronthaler's second collection for Vivienne Westwood (the designer's former Gold Label line), was hailed as a happy combinations of relaxed clothes, sexy bikinis, and functional jackets, asymmetric dresses and trousers. Showpieces included inverted skirts that engulfed the upper part of the body with their exaggerated necklines, a trick slightly reminiscent of Viktor & Rolf's designs.
Some commentators saw a summery pagan joy in the unisex clothes on the runway (especially in the straw headgear); others highlighted the boudoir tones of the collection. Kronthaler claimed it was a tribute to women, highlighting in the show notes, "Everything I know, I learned from women". But the notes also mentioned the Brexit results (subtly referenced in the name of the collection – 112 is indeed the emergency number in all member states of the European Union), and François Boucher's painting "The Rape of Europa".
Yet, if you started reading between the lines, you would have spotted something else: a model donned a powder pink dress with graffiti of female genitalia, but there was also the male equivalent, with a phallus sketched on a long blue vest (both the garments are already available to buy online).
Phalluses were also replicated in pendants in different colours or in all sorts of decorations such as sparkling gems (phallus-shaped pendants had already appeared in Kronthaler's previous collection for Westwood). Now, the phallus pendants may be inspired by the Roman and Greek cultures, but a vest with a simple rhinestone slogan - "CAZZO" (an Italian word meaning "cock" or "dick"; not to be confused with the exclamation "Cazzo!" translated in English with "Fuck!") - actually pointed to the real inspiration.
The same word, in the same configuration and made using the same sparkling elements was indeed first launched by Italian designer Walter Albini in his S/S 1979 collection. Two years earlier Albini had also organized a mixed-media exhibition at Milan's Galleria Eros that featured phalluses personalised by Albini himself and transformed into cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse, dressed to evoke designers like Armani, Basile and Ken Scott (a great way to maybe say they were all di**heads?) or covered in industrial design jewels.
Compared in 1972 by Women's Wear Daily to Yves Saint-Laurent: Albini was a forward-thinker, a man who, anticipating the "made in Italy" concept, reinterpreted the past and wrote the future but died too young to actually enjoy the fruits of his work.
Born in Busto Arsizio in 1941, Albini first moved to Turin and then to Paris, where he worked as a fashion illustrator for different magazines and papers. Back in Milan he worked for Krizia, Billy Ballo and, in 1972, designed the collections for five different brands – Callaghan, Basile, Escargot, Mister Fox and Diamant's – and presented them with an ambitious catwalk show featuring hundreds of models that took place at Milan's Circolo del Giardino and that influenced the final choice of moving the fashion catwalks from Florence to Milan.
Albini wasn't only talented, he was a compulsive, hyper-creative and restless designer, endowed with a chameleon-like beauty and with a pop sensibility: pictured like an eccentric or decadent dandy, photographed like Siddhartha sitting on a pile of clothes or a character out of The Great Gatsby, Albini was the first Italian designer who truly understood the power of the image. When he died in 1983, at just 42, Albini the underrated and charismatic fashion creator and stylist who used to design everything from buttons to textiles, had already managed to trace a path that - even nowadays - many fashion designers are consciously or unconsciously following.
Back to the "CAZZO" shirt then: there is obviously no copyright on such a word, but there is a copyright on the specific and creative way Albini arranged the word and appliqued it on a shirt, turning this term into a sort of logo. There is actually a copyright (that lasts for 70 years after the death of an author) even if an author died and didn't leave behind any direct heirs (a dead author may have left his estate to a library or an institution, did Kronthaler check?).
Besides, the original "CAZZO" shirt and the phalluses exhibition in Milan were incredibly controversial, irreverent and a bit scary for their time: here was indeed a designer who dared speaking his own mind and shocking people by including profanities on his shirts. Kronthaler's "Cazzo" shirt is definitely not an irreverent item, but reeks of a fake and lazy rebellion and an alignment not with underground culture but with the marketing forces of the mainstream.
The saddest thing about this story, though, is that Kronthaler did not acknowledged - or maybe he did so via the NASA pilfered logo reading "Destination Italy" printed on shirts and tte bags? - Albini's influence.
Looks like the designer may have learnt a lot from women, but he certainly borrowed from punks and punk zines the cut and paste technique as this show, that actually featured other Albini-sms, also proved. Albini was indeed hiding in the fluidly flowing dresses and in the various separates that called to mind his 1977 experiments.
Rather than coming up with his own collection for the Spring/Summer 1977 season, Albini organized an exhibition at Milan's Galleria Anselmino that featured twelve panels with collages of clothes he had taken from the collections of fashion designer friends and from the wardrobes of photographers and journalists exhibited with white masks of his face.
The project - featuring a wide range of pieces by Fiorucci, Missoni, Armani, Krizia and Issey Miyake among the others - aimed at poking fun at consumerism and at the relentless rhythms of the fashion industry while trying to make people ponder a bit about fashion culture. At the time Albini stated about this collection: "What interests me is giving indications of method. Both by designing and by using other people's things. It is necessary to learn the freedom of dressing outside the mold. Consumerism produces objects, not styles. I look around me, choose, combine and propose."
Maybe this is exactly what we have been seeing on most runways this season - a selection of objects produced by consumerism - but not too much originality and zero design intent. Who knows, for the next season designers may actually start making collections with garments borrowed from other designers like Albini did (in a way they are already doing so...).
From a journalistic point of view the fact that these stories rarely appear in publications about fashion prove that we are either too scared to point out where a collection derives from or who's being pilfered by modern designers (since many editors seem to be afraid not to be invited to the next show or to lose advertising money), or that we do not have the necessary fashion history, knowledge and memory to make such comparisons. Either way, it looks like fashion, with the exception of a few designers, has become a commercial exercise in producing copies.
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