It was 1993 when Franco Maria Ricci’s publishing house dedicated a volume of the Luxe, calme et volupté series to Roberto Capucci. Thirty years later, with the curatorship of the Roberto Foundation, the Labirinto della Masone hosts a new major exhibition as a tribute to the master of fashion.
An unparalleled genius of Italian fashion and style admired all over the world, Capucci is a true all-round artist whose career the exhibition at the Labirinto aims to celebrate in its various aspects, placing his creations, often resembling sculptures, alongside the works of art in the collection, thus creating new and unexpected dialogues, new suggestions that will have an incredible effect.
From his first atelier, opened in 1950 in Via Sistina in Rome, he was considered an absolute protagonist in the history of Italian fashion from a very young age. Appreciated abroad, he dressed female icons such as Marylin Monroe, Gloria Swanson, Jacqueline Kennedy, Elsa Martinelli, Irene Brin, Rita Levi Montalcini, who was to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1986 wearing one of his dresses, and Silvana Mangano, for whom Capucci, strongly desired by Pierpaolo Pasoli, designed the clothes for the film ‘Teorema’.
Architectural structures with colour as the absolute protagonist, Roberto Capucci thus sculpts the material of his creations which, with nature as their source of inspiration, survive the passing of the years without ever losing their expressive force, as great works of art can do.
This is how Sylvia Ferino, curator of the exhibition, sums up the complexity of the Maestro: “Whoever wears one of Capucci’s creations immediately becomes the protagonist of a scene of which he himself is the director: a scene that resembles the triumphal processions and festivals staged in the Renaissance and Baroque eras in honour of famous princes. Capucci is more than a creator of fashion: he is a director, architect and perhaps even dramatist, since his clothes dictate the ceremonial and etiquette of the court in a certain way, thus giving shape to the event, just as they fix the different characters and roles of the women who wear them.”
On the occasion of the exhibition, a new volume will be published by FMR editions dedicated to the great artist and stylist.
