Among the young Italian designers currently showcasing their collections during Milan Fashion Week, there is one who is actually more talented than your average Proenza Schouler or Alexander Wang, but who doesn't have the support young designers get in the States - Gabriele Colangelo.
Born into a well-known Italian family of furriers who boasts collaborations with the most famous Italian fashion houses and brands, Gabriele Colangelo has indeed the technical knowledge and skills to create coherent high quality collections, but he has also got the sensibility to rework his inspirations in interesting ways. The problem is that his inspirations usually get copied by other people who then end up getting the merit, the coverage and the support of the media.
Colangelo's Spring/Summer 2012 collection moved indeed from Gerhard Richter's over-painted photographs and themes such as reality and abstraction. Proenza Schouler reused Richter in their Spring/Summer 2013 (obtaining more or less the same textural effects Colangelo had achieved...). Richter reappeared more recently as the main inspiration also in MSGM's A/W 2014 collection.
So if you want to know what certain designers may use in their future collection we may as well check out Colangelo's latest designs.
For his A/W 2014 collection Colangelo moved from Kazimir Malevich’s "Black Square" and Joachim Bandau’s watercolours. The designer played around and revisited his main references in a clever way.
Colangelo turned in some cases Malevich's "Black Suprematic Square" (1915) into the pattern for architecturally functional dresses and outerwear; in other cases the black square was mixed with the white square of Malevich's "Suprematist Composition: White On White" (1918) to create stratifications of sheer chiffon in gradations that went from black to white passing through grey, perfectly evoking in this way also Bandau's grayscale watercolours.
Yet the interesting geometric effects created by the squares on the skirts also hinted at other artworks. That's actually where Colangelo's designs really draw you in: people who are familiar with Bruno Munari may spot in this collection Munari's xerographs or "methodical studies performed on an electrostatic copier", with those sheets of papers and assorted objects caught in movement by the photocopying machine. To create his xerographs, Munari used surfaces rather than lines; Colangelo did the same using his fabrics as flat horizontal surfaces to be used vertically on the body.
Other garments seemed to be related to the images Munari collected in his books, from grey/black abstract textures inspired by typography to Helmut Zimmermann's 1970s sequences that in this collection seemed to reappear in the studded and beaded patterns featured in two designs (see image 8 in this post), or the geometrical objects made with industrial parts designed by the Sulmona Art School in 1969 (as featured in a book by Munari) evoked by a fur intarsia motif on a sweater.
The good thing in such a collection is the fact that you can actually see other references in accordance with your own background and knowledge that go beyond the ones pointed out in the press release.
Despite the artistically geometric references, there was nothing cold or brutalist in this collection that, offering an interpretation of femininity in a modernist key, featured quite a few desirable pieces, apart from the dresses decorated with minimalist askew stratifications, including chunky black-and-white knitwear and bi-coloured boots
Art critics stated that Malevich's works denied love of life and nature, while fashion critics at times claim Colangelo is a cold designer. Yet Colangelo's biggest sin in today's world is not his alleged "coldness", but his fabric knowledge: in a world that only appreciates things that glitter, sparkle or make you look cute, his intellectual pieces will definitely take more time to be appreciated compared to instantly visually pleasing creations redundantly covered in sparkling embellishments or easly recognisable logos and slogans.
You wonder, though, would the media start considering him a "warmer" designer if certain powerful editors would suddenly support him more?
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