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Know Everything About The birth of the Italian fashion
style: Florence challenges Paris!!!
Added: June 16, 2009
If Paris was
considered the first capital of fashion in the 18th century thanks to
Marie Antoinette's personal designer, Rose Bertin, who transformed
the French queen into one of the very first arbiters of fashion, it
was Florence that was the scene of the first "Italian Haute
Couture Show", considered by all the press and international
buyers attending the show, as a revolutionary event.
This
innovative idea of a fashion show offering both the famous and
emerging Italian designers the opportunity of presenting their
creations to an international audience and gaining popularity and
prestige overseas, was conceptualized by the Florentine aristocrat
Giovan Battista Giorgini.
On February
the 12th 1951, Giorgini, considered the first promoter of the
"Made in Italy style" organized a fashion presentation in
the salon of his wonderful residence, Villa Torrigiani, in Florence,
and invited some important American buyers to come to Tuscany to
attend it, on their way back home from the Paris fashion shows.
This first
Italian High Fashion show was seen as a positive success story, quite
a revolution because, for the first time outside Paris, a fashion
parade had been exclusively organized for foreign buyers and
journalists. That special occasion sealed the overseas success of
some of the best Italian designers such as Giovanna Caracciolo,
Alberto Fabiani, Emilio Pucci, Emilio Schuberth.
The official
birthdate of the first Italian fashion shows, however, was really in
1952. After the success of his first Italian fashion parade in the
salon of his villa, Giorgini organized a new, more complete, fashion
presentation, choosing as the venue the impressive White Room at
Palazzo Pitti (still in Florence) , an enormous hall decorated with
stucco-works and frescos.
This time too,
Giovan Battista Giorgini had a brilliant idea: as well as assembling
the most fashionable Italian designers, he divided the show into
categories. The first section was devoted to Boutique collections of
leisure wear, which had proved to be very popular with US buyers,
followed by sportswear and finishing off with the "haute
couture". It was a sophisticated division that differentiated
the Italian fashion show from Paris and the world press responded
enthusiastically. The top newspapers and magazines, the day after the
presentation at Palazzo Pitti, openly complimented the organizational
superiority of Italy over France, the desire of Florence to challenge
and vanquish Paris in the fashion arena. |
