If you're a tourist visiting Sicily, buying a pupo (traditional marionette covered in metal armours enriched by engravings), a colourful cardboard cart pushed by a plastic donkey or even a cork temple is a must-do experience.
Hailing from Sicily, but mainly selling their clothes to fashionistas abroad, Domenico Dolce must have thought together with Stefano Gabbana, the other half of the famous fashion duo, that a menswear collection based on these traditional symbols may have been a total hit.
In a way they were right: every time their mens/womenswear collections displayed stereotypical Sicilian/Italian connections or inspirations borrowed from Catholic religion, they were praised by the media and stealing rather than simply moving from traditions was their winning formula in some cases such as their Autumn/Winter 2012-13 womenswear collection, based on the black dresses decorated with gold swirls of the statues of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows.
This would then explain why for their Spring/Summer 2013 menswear collection they opted for prints borrowed from the "opera dei pupi" replicated on shirts, shorts and jackets, for black and white images of Agrigento's Valley of the Temples, and for the kaleidoscopic motifs that decorate Sicilian carts.
To give the clothes some authenticity (and possibly save money in this perennial financial crisis...) they also enlisted non-professional models from Sicilian towns and villages who actually wore well the short sleeved shirts with Sicilian prints, the tops with pupi prints that unzipped right where the theatre curtain should be to give the impression you were at a pupi representation (View this photo), the roughly woven polo shirts with their raw hems accessorised with battered cases and cut-away sandals (a rather too stereotypical Sicilian immigrant look - View this photo), the striped fishermen's vests and the three-piece baggy wool or linen suits.
Though at least the collection was modelled by real boys (some as young as 11) and this gave it some genuine intent, there was mainly one point missing: the message wasn't in the Sicilian souvenirs but in the craft behind them and also in their stories.
The "opera dei pupi" is indeed a representation of the Medieval clashes between Knights and Moors, so it tells a story (just like a fashion collection) and the Pupari, the master puppeteers, are also artists and craftspeople helped in their work by very skilled artisans - including blacksmiths (to make the pupis' armours), painters (to decorate the details of the marionettes and the sets) and writers (to write the stories).
Being a symbol of art and of extraordinary cultural richness, around ten years ago, the Sicilian Puppet Theatre was placed on UNESCO's list of Immaterial Heritages of Humanity. You can easily spot the connections between the pupi theatre and a fashion atelier, where the designer, like a master puppeteer, is surrounded by other talented people.
Yet this connection wasn't maybe too clear, and it could have been explored in further and more subtle details (maybe leather or metal accessories that paid homage to the engraved armours donned by the pupis...).
Besides, the time has also come for D&G to maybe look at less stereotypical Sicilian icons: Peppino Impastato or Placido Rizzotto may be too political and revolutionary for a fashion industry that only plays at being revolutionary, but it's scared of bringing revolution on the runway, and yet such inspirations or, as an alternative, the artists of the Sicilian tailoring school, would represent very positive values.
You could argue that this collection was a sort of triumph of insularity, but insularity sells well especially with foreign buyers and surely in our financially unstable times many designers would prefer to sell globally by being insular to selling on a smaller market by having globally recognisable inspirations.
The good news? We're now all entitled to get out of the cupboard our Sicilian pupis, carts and cork temples and put them in a corner of the house where everybody can see them. They're suddenly extremely fashionable.
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