It is always interesting to try and spot correspondences between modern collections and designs created a few decades ago. But sometimes it is also possible to spot correspondences between creations made a few decades ago by iconic designers.
For example, the late Japanese designer Issey Miyake launched for the A/W 1994-95 season his "Staircase Pleats" collection. The latter included a series of signature pleated polyester works, characterized by a staircase or ziggurat-like form.
In one case four panels formed the body of the garment, the pleated structures creating staircase effects on the sides, on the front and back of the dress. Miyake also came up with pants characterised by a staircase silhouette.
Critics at the time stated that the precision-cut staircases in this collection pointed at early modernist design and art movements, among them Cubism, the Bauhaus, and Russian Constructivism. Yet there was also another affinity and not with a specific art movement, but with an Italian fashion designer.
In the early '80s Italian Cinzia Ruggeri was the queen of the wearable staircase/ziggurat form: she created indeed quite a few designs inspired by it, among the others a yellow dress with multiple staircase cut panels protruding from it, a green one that was more similar to a ziggurat pyramid, and her most famous one, the "Homage to Lévi-Strauss" dress, with its staircase/stepped ziggurat form along the collar and skirt.
Conceived by Ruggeri as a personal symbol, but also as a reference to a common motif in post-modern architecture and design in the '80s (think about Alessandro Mendini's "Monumentino da casa" or "Monument for Home), the designer also applied it to her shoes.
Ruggeri's designs pre-date Miyake's, so it is only natural to wonder, did the Japanese designer actually see Ruggeri's dresses before coming up with his collection? We will never know for sure, but, as the designers both passed away, maybe they can now discuss the joys of the staircase dress in another world and, in case, settle their dispute about copyright matters in the celestial sphere.
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