We should have been celebrating the first day of Spring last week, but the thoughts of most of us are currently taken by the Coronavirus pandemic. But, despite the emergency is ruling (and ruining...) our lives, for today let's try to think about something uplifting like Spring, with this ball gown designed by Italian seamstress, journalist, designer and feminist Rosa Genoni.
The "Primavera" (Spring) gown was designed in 1906 and was inspired by Flora's dress in the painting "Spring" by Botticelli.
The silk ivory gown was characterised by a trumpet-shaped skirt and an ecru tulle overdress that opened on the left side.
The overdress featured a grid-like border with gold and silver embroideries and the gown was covered in rich floral motifs, embroidered in multicoloured threads and decorated with mother-of-pearl lamellea and glass tube beads. Materials such as Chenille, beads and threads employed in contrasting colours helped giving the embroideries beautiful three-dimensional effects.
The gown, made by the students of the Dressmaking Section of the Scuola Professionale Femminile della Società Umanitaria in Milan (Genoni directed the department and taught at the school until 1931 when she resigned to avoid having to swear allegiance to Fascism), was presented at Milan's International Exhibition in 1906 and represented Rosa Genoni's passion for fashion and art.
Born in 1867 in the province of Sondrio, Genoni spent some time in Paris where she got the chance of studying the local fashion traditions and where she got acquainted with French style and taste.
When she returned to Milan in 1888, Genoni went to work for a local tailoring house and fought for the improvement of the labour conditions.
From 1895 she started working for a famous Milanese tailoring house, H. Haardt et Fils, that had its main atelier in Corso Vittorio Emanuele 28 and branches in San Remo, St. Moritz and Lucerne.
Genoni realised that Italy had a great potential when it came to creating fashion, but, despite having been unified in 1861, the country lacked a strong national identity and this was one of the main reasons why it struggled to come up with its own fashion tradition and industry (Genoni was ahead of her times and in favour of the industrial profuction of garments).
Genoni decided therefore to look at the past and in particular at the Renaissance to find a national identity, and started developing designs inspired by the art of those times.
The designer claimed indeed that the artistic heritage of Italy could have been employed as inspiration for new clothes and hairstyles as well, characterised by a classical allure and an elegant style. While Italian fashion started in the 1950s, Genoni became a pioneer of the "Made in Italy" concept and an advocate for the rights of fashion workers.
The designs she created for the 1906 International Exhibition in Milan were very successful: for them she employed Italian textiles and the Flora-inspired dress (together with the court cape inspired by a drawing by Pisanello) won her the Grand Prize in the Decorative Art section of the event. In 1983, Rosa Genoni's daughter Fanny donated the gown to the Costume Gallery of Palazzo Pitti in Florence where it is still preserved and where, hopefully, we will all be to admire it again at the end of this emergency.
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