Mention the words "forbidden fashion" and your mind will probably conjure up some kind of controversial fashion collection, maybe too radical, sexy or extremely provocative that it must be somehow banned. Yet in the case of a recent Italian documentary (it has just been released on DVD; you can easily buy it online and it has English and French subtitles) about Roberto Capucci these words have a very different meaning.
In "La moda proibita - Roberto Capucci e il Futuro dell'Alta Moda" (Forbidden Fashion - Roberto Capucci and The Future of Haute Couture) by Ottavio Rosati they are indeed employed to define another way of creating fashion.
Modern fashion is about making money being mainly commercial, but Italian high fashion designer Capucci claims it is possible to find your own place in the industry, opting to follow a more artistic and less trodden path.
So the words "forbidden fashion" stand for a more elegant, arty and personal fashion, ostracized (and therefore "prohibited") by a system only interested in trendy collections, instant earnings and immediate fame.
The documentary retraces Capucci's career to understand better the designer's choice to drop out of the fashion cycles: in love with crayons and creative games as a child, as a young man Capucci graduated in Fine Arts and loved drawing (the designer amassed from the '50s on an archive of 50,000 drawings...).
Capucci propelled onto the fashion scene by Giovanni Battista "Bista" Giorgini, "the father of Italian fashion", who organized a first event in Italy in 1951, a legendary catwalk show that spawned the Italian industry.
As the years passed, Capucci opened an atelier in Rome and one in Paris, coming up with extraordinary Haute Couture designs.
Capucci's more artistic side kept on coming out collection after collection: he started building architectural and geometrical constructions or wrapping the wearer's body in flower-like shapes, almost putting it on a pedestal as if it were a statue, exalting it and making it inaccessible.
One of his secrets remains his passion for natural fabrics, especially silk, that he employed in the most unusual combinations of colours (dyed in Lyon and Como, often in the same shade of flower samples he used to send to the factories), or radically transformed through unusual configurations of pleats.
The documentary looks for example at one dress dubbed "Oceano", characterized by waves of fabric: Capucci's head mistress remembers in the film that it took 115 metres of fabric in 27 shades of blue (to symbolise all the colours of the ocean from shallow waters to stormy seas), 1,500 pieces of pleated fabrics, 5 seamstresses and 5 months to create this unique piece with a surface that could be considered as infinite and endless as the oceans.
The documentary then looks at some of the exhibitions that featured Capucci's work, at Venaria Reale in Turin and Palazzo Moraldo in Milan, and reminds us how the designer was invited to the Venice Biennale as a sculptor, while his extraordinary pleated red coat became a symbol in Vienna for the poster about a Mozart event at the Albertina.
The documentary is not as polished as modern fashion films, but it features archival footage from the Istituto Luce, interviews with designer Anna Fendi, soprano Raina Kabaivanska, and obviously with Capucci himself.
Among the highlights of the documentary there are several images in which Capucci's gowns are compared to paintings, buildings, churches and fountains, and the designer's memories about working with Pasolini and dressing Silvana Mangano in Teorema, creating an iconic velvet dress for the Nobel prize awarding ceremony of scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini (who eventually became a customer and owned 47 Capucci dresses, most of them looking the same, according to the designer).
The designer remembers in an interview how he decided to get off the fashion bandwagon when the industry became more commercial and magazines seemed only interested in selling adverts rather than in writing about fashion.
Turning his back on the fashion circus, Capucci opted for freedom: he left the National Chamber of Fashion, decided to start producing only one collection a year in his own terms, while working on other projects such as fashion exhibitions and costumes. At 88, Capucci doesn't seem to have any regrets, he considers himself as an artist, sculptor and researcher in fabrics, architecture and geometries.
In a way the documentary may have been more elegantly done (some sections like the ones about the bride dreaming about a Capucci wedding dress seem redundant and may have been edited out), it looks indeed like a rough diamond in the making.
At the same time "Forbidden Fashion" is worth watching it to rediscover some archival pieces, look at comparisons between grand Capucci gowns and Roman architectures and, above all, realize that it is possible to drop out of fashion while continuing to make it and even live happily (very happily) ever after.
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