6. ITALIANA: Looking for Italian Fashion - Gabriele Monti

Europe and Fashion: Questioning Identities and Cultures. EFHA Conference 2018

“ITALIANA. Italy through the lens of fashion 1971-2001” is an exhibition and a book curated in 2018 by Maria Luisa Frisa, Gabriele Monti and Stefano Tonchi, which reconstruct the history and the narratives of Italian fashion in the seminal thirty years between 1971 and 2001. A project like ITALIANA inevitably moves between the material and immaterial nature of fashion. It seeks to construct as three-dimensional a view as possible, associating the objects produced by Italian fashion - clothes, accessories, jewelry - with the imagery that has portrayed them and made them known to the world. A series of choices has shaped the critical approach and suggested themes and titles with which to organize still incandescent materials, bringing together, between visions and pragmatic acts, the qualities and the shortcomings, depending on the point of view, that make the blurry picture of Italian fashion. Identity,Democracy, Logomania, Diorama, Project Room, Bazaar, Postproduction, Glocal, The Italy of Objects: these themes are set out as a sort of open inventory, with bridges linking them in many different directions. These conceptual areas are fundamental to conveying a fluid image of the evolution of Italian fashion and the development of its characteristics. Like the exhibition, the iconographic atlas in the book is not organized chronologically: the themes are interwoven with one another in an assemblage that alludes to a fictional magazine, put together with the same aptitude for sampling and postproduction that characterizes and defines many of the finest, recent experiences in the landscape of Italian fashion. This experience is the occasion to question the possibility to define the qualities of Italian fashion through both curatorial and editorial practices.