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Paris, 1895: the city where the couturier considered the inventor of modern fashion shows, Charles Frederick Worth, died in March, welcomes the first film screening of the Lumière brothers a few days after Christmas. A relay event that represents in an almost plastic way a passionate relationship, that between fashion and cinema. The dimension of showing, of staging, is common to the two worlds: actresses and actors on the one hand, models on the other, play the same role and have the same function, telling a story, be it a screenplay or a brand name. And of this representation the parade becomes the supreme moment, as Grazia d’Annunzio and Sara Martin effectively reconstruct in the agile but dense Ciak si parade (Postmedia). Thirty films shot over almost a century are examined by the authors, who in addition to the catalog of titles offer an interesting reading of the aesthetic and semantic evolution of this subgenre, even if the book reviews the broader link between the two worlds.
If a fashion show today is a media event it is also thanks to the Hollywood intuition of making it a story on the screen. In the studios a sort of initial, sacred reverence for the fascinating and mysterious world of the Parisian ateliers soon gives way to marketing intuitions; having failed at attempts to involve names like Coco Chanel (who would collaborate much more profitably with the European cinema of Jean Renoir and Luchino Visconti), the producers understood that ad hoc professionals were needed. Thus “costume designers” were born, who soon also became curators of the looks of the divas off the set and in some cases designers of clothes identical to or inspired by those on the sets and then sold to dreamy spectators in department stores (of Joan Crawford’s white dress in Return, Macy’s sold 50 thousand copies).
Italian cinema began to be interested in the social meanings of fashion at the beginning of the 1950s: it is perhaps no coincidence that in 1952, a year after what is considered the first Italian fashion show, organized by Giovan Battista Giorgini in the Sala Bianca of Palazzo Pitti, in Florence, Luciano Emmer turns to The Girls of the Spanish Steps, where his documentary filmmaker’s gaze captures the dreams and realities of the girls who work amid splendor and misery in the ateliers of post-war Rome. In one sequence, Zoe Fontana appears, one of the sisters from Parma who made their fortune dressing the stars of Hollywood and Cinecittà, measuring a dress for a very young Lucia Bosé.
Italian high fashion (or rather, Roman: ready-to-wear based in Milan will arrive at least after a couple of decades) is intrigued by cinema: Fernanda Gattinoni initially looks at it with distance, but when the costume designer Maria de’ Matteis he asks her to design the costumes for War and Peace, that Empire style is so effective that it later returns in one of his haute couture collections. Salvatore Ferragamo, meanwhile, in the United States where he successfully chose to move, had designed the famous (Over the) Rainbow sandal for Judy Garland a few years earlier to accompany the launch of The Wizard of Oz.
The leap to the 80s and 90s is exciting, and interprets the arrival in Hollywood of the now well-defined brands of Italian ready-to-wear, such as Giorgio Armani who dresses Richard Gere in American Gigolo and Nino Cerruti who gives his nonchalant elegance to Michael Douglas. Fashion has become an industry and films such as Robert Altman’s Pret-à-Porter and The Devil Wears Prada begin to appear, revealing behind the scenes and hosting real fashion shows as designers and models interpret themselves. These are the years in which stylists (i.e. creators of looks and not clothes) such as Patricia Field, owner of a research boutique in the East Village and who made the brands symbols of the late 20th century, became the other protagonists of the series. Sex and The City (where the supreme token of love is not a ring but a pair of blue Manolo Blahnik shoes).