You don't need to be a fashion insider to see trends being en vogue again, you just need to be old enough to witness a specific colour, cut or silhouette coming back into fashion. If you are a fashion historian and researcher this means you can write more about that specific trend, make connections, expand your original knowledge and educate younger generations about something that was popular decades ago and that is now coming back.
Yet there is a modern problem maybe linked with the habit of the current fashion industry of churning out copies of what was fashionable or provocative rather than recreating a trend from the past. This problem means that, rather than writing historically engaging pieces about how a specific trend developed and was relaunched, you end up tweaking something you wrote a while back and republishing it again (remember the recent Tom Ford/Yves Saint Laurent sculpted bustier case?).
The latest example regards Gucci's Cruise 2020 collection, recently launched with a new campaign: the advert shows a lavish, over the top and kitsch party and in a couple of frames you can spot two designs that could be filed under the "pretino dress" category.
If you go back to the February 2018 post entitled "No, Not Another Pretino Dress", you will rediscover how the pretino dress (literally "little priest dress") was originally created in 1956 by the Sorelle Fontana (Fontana Sisters) for Ava Gardner. At the time the three sisters even asked Catholic authorities for the permission to design the dress and the Vatican granted it.
Voluptuous Anita Ekberg donned a similar version of the "pretino" in Fellini's film "La Dolce Vita", disturbing the bourgeois consciences of the self-righteous.
In 1991, Krizia recreated two new versions of the "pretino" dress: both were mini-dresses, but one was decorated with high-prelate buttons and another, more similar to the model worn by Ekberg, was a black cady and white satin dress completed by a hat. In February 2018 the pretino reappeared on Dolce & Gabbana's A/W 18 runway.
In Gucci's advert one pretino dress looks similar to the one donned by Anita Ekberg in "La dolce vita", another is more similar to the reinvented one on Dolce & Gabban's runway, with the classic Roman Catholic priest's collar.
Now, you may argue that imitation spawns innovation, but at the moment another pretino dress doesn't spawn anything. While it was first launched as a stunt (but even then it was approved by the Catholic church as the Fontana Sisters were devout Catholics and had asked for permission), Fellini used it to shock, but, by the time Dolce & Gabbana copied it, the Met Museum was launching its Costume Institute's Spring 2018 Exhibition "Heavenly Bodies" about fashion and the Catholic imagination, so D&G's pretino perfectly fit in with a trend. Relaunching it again is not controversial (people do not get so easily shocked nowadays...) nor trendy, but it could be interpreted as a sign of design laziness. I do agree with you - this post is repetitive and boring, but lazy design can only generate lazy writing.
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