ROBERTO CAPUCCI. Silken Armours
14 october 2022 – 16 april 2023
Curated by Fondazione Franco Maria Ricci and Fondazione Roberto Capucci, in collaboration with Sylvia Ferino.
Italian fashion maestro Roberto Capucci is the subject of the major fall exhibition at Labirinto della Masone. Thirty years ago, in 1993, Franco Maria Ricci published a book of Capucci’s work as part of the Luxe, calme et volupté series: to honour that anniversary, the Fondazione Roberto Capucci, together with the Fondazione Franco Maria Ricci, have curated a new exhibition in collaboration with Sylvia Ferino. Roberto Capucci is an unequalled genius of Italian fashion and style, admired throughout the world, and his creations have been exhibited in major museums.
The exhibition in Fontanellato aims to celebrate multiple aspects of his career, placing his dresses in dialogue with artworks from the collection to create unexpected and original associations and new artistic connections to startling effect.
The exhibition in Fontanellato aims to celebrate multiple aspects of his career, placing his dresses in dialogue with artworks from the collection to create unexpected and original associations and new artistic connections to startling effect.
Contemporary historians of fashion have agreed that the term “designer” fails to capture Capucci’s work: it is impossible to place him within a single category as his is a fully developed artistic practice. His dresses are architectonic structures in which colour, the undisputed star of the show, sculpts material, resulting in creations with unequalled expressive power.
Throughout his career, his status has permitted him to dress iconic women such as Marilyn Monroe, Gloria Swanson, Jacqueline Kennedy, Elsa Martinelli, Irene Brin, Rita Levi Montalcini, who received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in one of his dresses in 1986, and Silvana Mangano, for whom Capucci, at the strong suggestion of Pierpaolo Pasolini, designed costumes for the film Teorema. “Roberto Capucci is a transformer, a Houdini, a magician, an inventor, but above all a gardener, a prince of nature,” the designer Antonio Marras has said.
“He does not design dresses, he forms them, as if they were made of precious porcelain. Roberto Capucci is a mathematician and a botanist,
an aeronautical engineer, Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, who asks for a sheep to be drawn to eat a baobab. Roberto Capucci is an explorer and storyteller of clothing in motion. The world of myth comes to life in a universe that is constantly transforming itself, like living, changing nature.”
Nature is the primary catalyst in his work and the descriptions in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Daphne and other characters are transformed into trees or animals, serve as inspiration: these myths may be found in Capucci’s dresses, the materiality of the textiles serving to transform them into actual sculptures in which fabrics and colour prevail, creating “silken armour” that seems to defy the human figure.
The evening dresses, in particular, are timeless creations in which the designer makes his unmistakable mark, with his constant formal and chromatic research that does not shy away from the most diverse materials, from the rarest silk to simpler natural elements such as raffia or straw, in a continuous search for new expressive possibilities of Beauty. The memorable ed epic creations of the ‘80s, such as Farfalle (Butterflies) and Cerchi (Circles), came to life in this way, and recall forms from the animal kingdom, as did Variazioni nel Verde e Colore (Variations in Green and Colour), in which colour imposes itself, taking the lead in audacious and courageous chromatic combinations.
