Yesterday's post closed with an art reference: fashion designer Rick Owens seems to have been obsessed for the last few months with the head of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti "Italian Loudspeaker" sculpted by Italian artist Thayaht in 1935.
The head actually had a controversial inspiration: before it, Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles) had indeed designed in 1929 (first in stone and then in bronze) a head of the Duce Benito Mussolini (View this photo). The piece was characterised by strong and streamlined shapes and represented a helmeted Duce, embodying warfare.
At the time Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who published the Futurist Manifesto in 1909, praised Thayaht for the minimalist shapes of the sculpture.
Futurism and Fascism formed a sort of alliance in the early 1920 as the values of the former (a passion for action, technology and war...) coincided with the policy of the latter. It was only when the fascist aesthetic policy became more conservative that its ties with Futurism were severed.
A few years after his sculpture of the Duce, Thayaht dedicated a piece to Marinetti: the similarities between the two heads are striking as Thayaht opted once again for a smooth surface, a head that looked like a helmet and that transformed Marinetti not into a knight in armour, but in an armoured knight in a metallic and robotic shell.
Thayaht got to this interpretation after a series of sketches in pencil in which he moved from a Marinetti portrait and gradually stripped him down of his humanity.
Thayaht's head of Marinetti isn't the only thing that inspired Owens so far: one of the fashion and interior designer's chairs in alabaster seems indeed a reinterpretation of a square chair on which a shrouded figure sits in Thayaht's sketch for his sculpture "Io Sono Te" (I Am You; bizarre how the shroud also makes you think about Owens' hieratical designs).
Owens was recently commissioned a piece for New York's MoMA Design Store and came up a scarf with Thayhat's head of Marinetti (you can buy it from the MoMA store for $250; you wonder if Owens had to pay for the copyright of the picture used, Thayaht died in 1959, so his works are technically still copyrighted, but the image printed on the scarf is a photograph of Marinetti's head taken later on).
The limited-edition scarf is inspired by MoMA's exhibition "Items: Is Fashion Modern?" (on view through January 28, 2018), an event exploring the past, present and future of 111 items that have had a strong impact on the history and society in the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet, quite often while analysing in depth pieces created by contemporary designers, you realise you don't even need to visit such an event to discover that the answer to such a difficult question is actually a negative one - fashion is indeed definitely not modern as we're to busy pillaging the past (at times a past with very disturbing political connections and implications...) having finished the ideas for the future.
Comments