The fashion pack may be in Paris at the moment for the fashion week, but this weekend there are some intriguing fashion and art connections to explore also in Milan.
The Milano Museo City event that kicked off yesterday and will be on until tomorrow, invites indeed locals and tourists to explore over 80 museums with special events and exhibitions.
The theme of this year is nature and it is analysed in different ways, interpreted in connection with human beings, in contrast with urban spaces or admired as a vast and sublime uncontaminated landscape.
Nature can be studied via dedicated installations at the Science and Natural History museums (the shell installations at the Natural History Museum inspired by Flemish paintings are particularly beautiful), but there are more unusual explorations of nature even in smaller venues.
At the library in the house of Alessandro Manzoni it is possible to discover books, volumes, essays and treaties from the 1800s focusing on some of the passions of the Italian writer, including agriculture, the practice of breeding silkworms and cotton production.
Graphic designers will be mesmerised instead by Leonetto Cappiello's early 1920s adverts for Campari at the Galleria Campari.
Cappiello is known for employing colours in a joyous way, creating visually strong images that can still teach us something about adverts 100 years after they were created (visitors who are into marketing and advertising techniques should note how in his illustrations Cappiello reduced the product he was advertising to a small detail, while he gave more importance to the rest of the composition – a stratagem that allowed consumers to appreciate the product as part of the artwork and not as the protagonist).
At WOW Spazio Fumetto there is the chance to explore more illustrations made by Raoul Verdini for Gianni Rodari's Il Romanzo di Cipollino (1951), an ingenious novel for children and a parable set in the world of vegetables rendered in vivid drawings.
Art-wise nature can be admired in different ways: there is an unusual representation of nature in Remo Bianco's '60s "Snow Sculptures", little scenes covered in artificial snow trapped in glass boxes that manage to take the visitors to a fantasy and imaginary realm.
Nature erupts in all its force and dnyamism in the tree wrapping around the building of the Studio Museo Francesco Messina: this is Leonardo Nava's installation (made by weaving 5,500 nut tree branches and literally sculpting them to form a sinuous shape sensually embracing the perfect architectural lines of the building), or can be admired in the still life paintings from the 1600s and 1700s, like the ones in the Geo Poletti collection at Palazzo Reale, or by Joseph Nigg at Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. Nigg painted flowers for a Vienna-based porcelain manufacturer between 1805 to 1843 (visitors should maybe try and spot a connection between the paintings of flowers in the various exhibitions at Milano Museo City and in Prada's A/W 19 collection).
At the same venue it is also possible to admire traditional garments strongly linked with anthropology such as a cape employed in cannibalistic ceremonies by the Tupinamba populations.
The cloak is a scary object, but it is also beautifully made with 5,300 feathers of ibis rubra appliqued on a cotton net, a traditional technique employed by these populations in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Infinitely less disturbing but equally intriguing the Flemish tapestries at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum introduce visitors to a different technique that artisans employed to create intricate images of vegetables, flowers, fruits and symbolical animals on textiles.
Yet maybe impenitent fashionistas and Haute Couture lovers will prefer the evening gowns from the Armani Privé collections (2009, 2011 and 2012) on display at Armani Silos.
Fashion fans who are interested in technical studies of garments should head instead to Palazzo Morando to explore a selection of jackets and blouses designed by the late Gianfranco Ferrè between the end of the '80s and the early '90s.
Among them there are also sartorial experiments and hybrid garments such as jackets characterised by a blouse-like construction, like the one in a crêpe taffeta fabric with a rose motif inspired by the 1800s, but designed in 1988.
While Milano Museo City allows to explore several museums, galleries and institutions with unique installations, it only lasts for one weekend, but quite a few of the exhibitions involved in this celebration of all forms of arts will be open throughout March, offering the chance to locals and tourists to catch up with what they may have missed during these three hectic days of cultural events.
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