| Pucci Taschen
Pucci Fashion Story
Armando Chitolana (Ed.)
Vanessa Friedman
Alessandra Arezzi Boza
Directed and produced by Benedikt Taschen
Foreword by Laudomia Pucci
Psychedelic, kaleidoscopic, encyclopedic; the Pucci book from Taschen brims over with an absolute abbondonza[ITAL] of brilliant images and information; raising the bar on what we should expect from lavish fashion volumes.
The limited-edition book sparkles in its different collectible Pucci print covers, but it also satisfies the deepest curiosity of the most avid Pucci collector, answering the question: where did all those free-wheeling prints and daringly modern sports clothes spring from? Today it is possible to envision a career in fashion almost from birth, or at least by toddler age — upon buying one’s first pair of high heels — but before there were master’s degrees in fashion, fashion video games, fashion blogs by tweens and fashion reality shows, careers in the industry often arose seemingly out of nowhere. In the case of the grandly titled Marchese Emilio Pucci di Barsento it was a confluence of particularly disparate circumstances that culminated in a body of work that deserves to be hailed as utterly unique.
Born into an ancient Florentine noble family, Marchese Pucci matriculated during the 1930s at the University of Milan, studying architecture, which can certainly be seen as terrific preparation for the fashioning of clothes to fit the three-dimensional human figure. He was diverted from this path when he ended up with a skiing scholarship to Reed College in Oregon, where he earned a master’s degree in history. While an understanding of history can also be useful to a fashion creator, it was more likely that his experience re-designing the Reed ski team’s uniforms and working with the local firm White Stag on production that taught him how to translate ideas about fit and movement into workable reality. During World War II Pucci served as a pilot in the Italian Air Force, which gives us insight into understanding the aerial-view quality of many of his greatest prints. Next we learn that he had an affair with Mussolini’s daughter Edda Ciano, which led to him being jailed and tortured by the Nazis. Is it a stretch to speculate that jail time may have honed his imagination? It’s probably more important that we can infer that he was quite the ladies man, and that, perhaps most of all, gave him a special insight into the sartorial needs of women.
Après prison, Pucci was skiing in the Alps wearing streamlined ski clothes of his own design when he was noticed by an equally avid skier, American fashion photographer Toni Frissell, who encouraged Harper’s Bazaar (ITALICS) to immediately publish photos of her new find. From making ski clothes to beach fashions was a short leap from the Alps to the isle of Capri, then still a way-off-the-beaten track vacation spot where Pucci had gone with his family forever. Fashioning beachwear was not a far leap from designing ski clothes, at least not for Pucci who was equally at home in the Alps and on the isle of Capri, where his family had long vacationed. At the time, Dior’s “New Look,” with its voluminous skirts, was dominating postwar high fashion.
However, in Capri, as Marchesa Cristina Pucci, (who he married in 1959), would recall, the situation was a bit different: “skirts at a beach resort, especially one with lots of steps up and down, are not exactly liberating. So Emilio made a man’s trouser for a woman – as body-conscious as his ski-wear, stretched exactly over the hips and cropped at the ankle – and paired with an extremely lightweight silk shirt, both realized in the bright shades found on the island.”
Although women had sported man-tailored trousers during the 1930s and ’40s, Pucci’s pants were utterly different: not just flattering but modern in a fun, new way. It didn’t hurt that customers enjoyed being fitted by him, tall and practically wasp-waisted himself in white pants and a white shirt. Exclusivity also added to allure (you could only buy them in Capri). As ex-American Vogue (italics) Polly Mellen remembered: “When I went on my honeymoon in 1952, we went to Capri, and I said to my husband Louis, ‘I have to have a Pucci,’ and we went to the little shop down a cobblestone street that was just filled with color, and I got an outfit – I’ve never had a pair of pants that fit like that. A pair of those pants, and a silk shirt that weighed nothing with a bateau neckline, and, my God, you felt you looked better than everyone else in the room, except everyone else in the room was wearing the same thing!”
After the pants and tops came the prints, for which Pucci is perhaps best known, and the book ably depicts the importance of Italy’s artistic heritage and natural beauty to Pucci’s complex patterns. With the strategic use of fashion photographs not seen since they were originally published, the book demonstrates the mosaic quality of his prints against the marble and brick patchwork of Florentine architecture or the tesserae of a Sicilian pool. There are also illustrations of his designs that were inspired by such historic traditions as the annual races of the contrade (italics) at Palio. In her introduction, Pucci’s daughter Laudonia Pucci sums up his contributions to fashion beautifully: “He was a minimalist before minimalism; a jet-setter before jets were flying; a scientist before fabric technology became a discipline; provocative in his modernity and sartorial daring.”
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