At the same time, fashion sat alongside other creative disciplines as part of an avant-garde that wished to destabilize postwar modernist ideals of “good design.” Rather than plain, simple, and efficient, Italian “Radical design,” per Germano Celant’s 1972 coinage, was colorful, bombastic, irregular, heterogeneous, and unpredictable. The role of the “stylist” emerged as a means of navigating between small boutiques and fashion firms and the latest methods of mass production. New textiles were available, as was high-quality manufacturing on a larger scale. Like other forms of Italian design, fashion in the late ’60s was undergoing a profound practical and ideological evolution. After studying fine art at the Accademia delle Arti Applicate in Milan, she apprenticed at Carven in Paris before returning to work for her father’s company, which produced women’s suits and coats. While her work spanned decades and disciplines (she had her first art exhibition in 1960 in Milan and her last, an installation of multimedia works, in 2019), Ruggeri is best known for her couture and ready-to-wear collections of the 1970s and ’80s. The behavioral garment is invested in imagination and innovation, for, as Ruggeri said, “we are only allowed to live in the future.”Ĭinzia Ruggeri, Stivali Italia (Italy Boots), 1986, leather boots and clutch bags. The behavioral garment knows it has an impact not only on its wearer but on the surrounding world, because fashion is about more than function: It is relational, social, communicative. A black leather purse shaped like the designer’s beloved Scottish terrier, Scherzi, whose name means “jokes” or “pranks”. A round red leather purse with a glove affixed to the outside so it can be used in the art of self-defense: Guanto-borsa schiaffo (Slap-Glove Bag), 1983. A season of clothes with pearls and dog treats deliberately hidden in their folds. A pair of thigh-high green leather boots in the shape of Italy (get it?), with matching Sicily and Sardinia clutches. A blue dress and matching jacket with fabric that undulates like the sea, to be worn with an octopus-tentacled glove on one hand. A shirt with a tiny pooch on a chain by which he can slide from his appliqué doghouse to a nearby embroidered bush. A dress made of salami string to encase the body like a sausage. A white shift with a collar that rolls out into a tablecloth with utensils. In Ruggeri’s work, the behavioral garment is emotional, interactive, insouciant, serious, droll, joyful, surprising, and-above all-something to be deeply, intensely inhabited.Ī white chiffon frock fitted with LED lights that can be turned on and off-for a “shy wearer or a wearer who had some kind of speech impairment to express something and even open up.” Textiles covered with liquid crystals that change color according to the body temperature of the attired. through behavioral garments.” A beguiling phrase, “behavioral garments” in Italian, abiti comportamentali. “I loved this aspect of fashion as the entire point behind my work wasn’t to continuously and bulimically create, but to tackle and explore these issues. “FASHION ALLOWED ME to explore the wearer’s intimate secrets, needs, and desires, but also a person’s crazes, fads, and nervous disorders,” said the Milanese polymath Cinzia Ruggeri in 2013, six years before her death at age seventy-seven. Cinzia Ruggeri in her studio, Milan, 1982.
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