I have mentioned in a previous post the connection between Chanel’s cruise collection and Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice and today I'd like to dedicate a post to Visconti's film, briefly analysing it costume-wise.
The shooting for this film taken from Thomas Mann's novel started in 1970 at the Hotel Des Bains on Venice’s Lido. At the time the hotel was being refurbished but art director and set designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti managed to recover the original pieces of furniture that had been taken away from the hotel rooms and dining hall (and even got back the turquoise vases of the hall...) from a warehouse on the Giudecca Island and rebuilt with them the perfect environment to tell the story of Gustave Aschenbach’s troubling attraction for adolescent boy Tadzio.
Visconti's idea for the film quickly found a producer and therefore enough money to start the shooting. At the time though Visconti's faithful costume designer, Piero Tosi, was recovering after a car accident. The director asked him to start working on the costumes for Tadzio, the boy who had to embody the perfect ideal of beauty, and, though Tosi wasn’t well and was tempted to refuse the job, he did all the same a few drafts, and soon after ended up designing also all the other costumes.
Actress Silvana Mangano was chosen to interpret the role of Tadzio's mother and Visconti suggested Tosi to take inspiration for his costumes from the photographs he gave him of his own mother, Carla Erba, a stylish woman often portrayed in vanilla and soft pink dresses and with hats wrapped up in yards of tulle maline.
Following Visconti's direction, the costumes were matched with extraordinary hats that Tosi conceived as architectural creations made by his talented milliner Elsa.
The hats were completed by hairstyles designed by Tosi and made by hairstylists Maria Teresa Corridoni, Gilda De Guilmi and Luciano Vito.
Though the two evening dresses worn by Silvana Mangano were made for the film, the majority of the costumes were actually taken from the archives of the Umberto Tirelli tailoring house. Tirelli had indeed bought a few dresses that had belonged to a Rome-based dressmaker called Concetta Gazzoni, who used to buy old dresses worn by upper class ladies and resell them to her middle-class clients.
The costumes for the beach scenes, the swimwear for the male characters and all the hats were designed by Tosi and entirely made from scratch by Tirelli.
Linen and canvas-based fabrics were the costume designer’s main choice, but for Tadzio’s swimwear Tosi had to do further researches. After trying different types of jerseys for Tadzio’s costumes and obtaining very poor results, Tosi went to the famous via Sannio market in Rome that sells second-hand clothes, vintage pieces and items from past collections where he found swatches of American rayon that proved to be the perfect fabric for what the costume designer had in mind. Death in Venice is the second part of Luchino Visconti's "German Trilogy" that also features La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969) and Ludwig (1972). The film won the 25th Anniversary Award at Cannes in 1971 while it was also nominated the following year to the Oscars in the Best Costume category. In fact the film caused a sort of fashion earthquake when it came out in the States.
Diana Vreeland saw the film in a New York cinema and decided she wanted to meet Piero Tosi and Umberto Tirelli to talk with them about the original pieces they had used in the movie.
In the early 70s Vreeland went to Rome to look for materials to feature in an exhibition entitled Inventive Clothes that had to chronicle the influence of French fashion from 1919 to 1939 and finally met Tirelli in his tailoring house.
She soon realised no museum she had ever visited actually had in its archives the pieces Tirelli had bought throughout the years led by his passion for style and fashion and by the sort of obsession for history only archaeologists usually display.
The Italian tailor agreed to lend the American editor and icon of style a few designs he preserved in his archive - one by Poiret and eight by Chanel (among them there was also a black skirt suit that had belonged to the mother of costume designer Bice Brichetto, who gave it to Tirelli for his archive) - that were later exhibited at the Inventive Clothes event.
The collaboration and friendship between Vreeland and Tirelli continued throughout the following years, but the most extraordinary thing about it is that it was indirectly sparked by a film.
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