• 15/10/2019

Fashion, change fabric

An archive of 60 fashion photographs of silver salts jelly, on display until May 30, 2020

From the golden age of the Couturiers and the great tailors to that of the great social revolutions.

The first photo on display is from 1952, the last of 1973: in just 21 years documented by this exhibition everything changes.

The clothes change, but the way of interpreting them also changes (and above all).

The models show in their poses the novelties of a society that after the Second World War varies at a very fast pace: the Dior New Look, the first beauty contests, the moon landing, the cinema industry, the '68 throughout the world, Woodstock, the conflict in Vietnam, the Beat generation, the Studio54: on closer inspection there is everything in these photos. Fashion follows the history of society, sometimes precedes it, others accompanies it, in an indissoluble weave.

We never dress for pure need: every dress worn involves choices that reflect, more or less consciously, our values ​​and our myths. How much freedom is there in a miniskirt, in a fluid fabric that caresses the body without compressing it, in a soft pant?

Allegati

The poses change, following the models of beauty in the making: if in the 50s the ideal woman exhibits her austerity by gathering her hair and stiffening her posture, to show herself adult, in a few years the value of youth takes over as a such: the models are rejuvenated, become first saucy, then femme fatales armed with make-up, provocative looks and loose hair.

There are 60 portraits of a changing female figure, in search of a more contemporary identity, but they are also snapshots of dresses that pass from the elegant and conventional static of the catalogs of dresses for women to the somewhat brazen refinement of fashion photos. Mannequins that over the years become top models. Photographers who become directors and interpreters of a new world, that of the best tailors who invent prêt-à-porter and renew themselves as world-class luxury companies that are still current today.

Images that document how the naive pin up and middle-class lady of the 1950s were able to turn into women aware of themselves and of their own sensuality as the transgressive interpreter of the 1970 Krizia collection immortalized with a cigarette between her fingers.

The fashion that becomes "for everyone" interprets the changes of a society that never as in the second half of the 900 has seen the modernity and the rapidity of the change that it brings with it become real.