As a follow up to yesterday's post, let’s look today at another film that inspired quite a few fashion designers, A Clockwork Orange, and at its connections with Fiorucci.
The futuristic look of the droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, was devised by Italian costume designer Milena Canonero, the recipient of many Academy Awards, and an artist who indirectly spawned fashion trends through her work for films such as Out of Africa and Chariots of Fire.
The costumes, comprising bovver boots, white suspenders and black bowler hats - a sort of bizarre uniform between that of a policeman and of a perverse and violent superhero - inspired cult styles among London's youth, resurfacing also in the music scene with quite a few rock and indie bands adopting it every now and then on their album covers or videos.
Every now and then Alex and his droogs reapperead also on the fashion runways: for example, there were echoes of Canonero’s costumes for Alex and his droogs in the woollen long johns and codpieces in Alexander McQueen’s A/W 2009-10 menswear collection. Yet one of the first labels that explored the possibilities of the Clockwork Orange look was Fiorucci.
The latter included in its A/W 1985-86 collection a unisex white suit with an Optical print that called to mind Alex's look (on the runway it was matched with a bowler hat to make the connection clearer).
While the white of the droogs' uniform was supposed to be a reference to purity, early symptoms of illness, aseptyc environments and walking corpses, Elio Fiorucci states in the Italian TV documentary about Kubrick's film entitled "La meccanica dell'arancia" (The Mechanics of the Orange) that the white in this movie is a sort of "corrupted" shade.
Indeed the white of the milk, usually considered as a safe and reassuring drink, has been altered by drugs, while the white of the uniforms is corrupted by the violent behaviour of the droogs wearing them (I'm embedding the documentary with Fiorucci talking in this post - the doc is in Italian, Fiorucci speaks around 08:10).
I wonder if this "corruption" was also on the designer's mind when he came up with the white suits included in the A/W 1985-86 collection.
I’m going to leave you with Campag Velocet’s "Drencrom Velocet Synthemesc" hit to let you ponder a bit further about Elio Fiorucci’s words and his designs inspired by Kubrick's film.
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