Namaste Readers,
Who knew that something as superficial ( in litera ) as fashion can be profound and enlightening? "Art Into Fashion," the latest exhibit in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, highlights Roberto Capucci-- the Thoreau of haute couture -- and his contribution to Italian fashion and art.
Like a transcendentalist or a Romantic, Capucci drew inspiration from Nature in his early years. He created dresses using colors and designs from flowers, ripples and concentric circles in ponds, waterfalls, and more. The puffy poppy mini dress en vogue in 2010-2011 was inspired from Capucci's 1950-ish rose bud dress, where the skirt looks like an upside down burgeoning rose, and from the waist up is the stem elongated by the lines and curves of a human body.
In his later years, his dresses became more architectural popularizing layers of pleats and origami folds and innovating chemise, sack dresses, and box-cut dresses; the implied lines of the body disappeared and became explicit architectural feats that outlined silhouettes of structural buildings, and various textures, such as stones, metallic wires, glow-in-the-dark beads from Assisi, straws from the wheat fields of Italy, plastic, and more.
It's interesting how Capucci's artistic vision and journey started outwardly and ended inwardly. In his youth, dresses/clothes are empheral ( subjected to the whims of the latest trend ) and wearable for everyday use ( in the present moment a la carpe diem ). As Capucci aged, the WILDerness is tamed, domesticated, and made more concrete ( literally? ); dresses/clothes are brick homes for the human body, and they are a shelter from harm: a static sculpture for display.
One can speculate that Capucci's shift from organic to synthetic reveals his delusions about the physical world and it senses. Maybe he's a closet-buddhist, who started to understand a truth about achieving happiness by DEtaching his human models from fabrics. In doing so, Capucci began to free himself from his PASSION ( literally from the Latin root ) for fashion and the illusion of the material world.
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