In this sunny August, the Biella area offered its hospitality to the excellence of world tailoring, welcoming the 39th Congress of the Word Federation of Master Tailor. Around 300 tailors from 34 countries gave rise to a series of conferences, meetings and visits, culminating with two fashion shows, one for Italian tailoring and one for foreign tailoring, held in the splendid medieval setting of Piazza Cisterna.
The Italian tailoring "school" is among the most authoritative in the world, thanks to its artisanal ability, synonymous with taste, style and perfection, and is an ideal partner for the Biella area, where local wool mills produce jewel fabrics for the "made-to-measure" connoisseurs ”.
The secrets of this traditional art are handed down in the National Academy of Tailors in Rome, founded in 1575 and considered the oldest Italian textile association. During the event, master Gaetano Aloisio, president of the Academy and new president of the Word Federation of Master Tailor, presented the coveted "Golden Scissors" award. The winner was the young master tailor Segun Jin, active in the "Liverano" tailoring shop in Florence, who was recognized for his great working skills, style, technical competence, creative flair and specific formal rigor, as the maximum expression of high artisanal value.
A few days later, “Oppenheimer” was released in theaters, a colossal and meaningful film, in which director Christopher Nolan tells the painful story of the Manhattan Project which created the first atomic bomb. The film is decidedly "masculine" and very clearly describes the aesthetics of formal clothing of the time, paradoxically not too far from what was seen on the Biella catwalks.
Behind this aesthetic is the extraordinary costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who, with the collaboration of Nino Cerruti, transformed Gordon Gekko's (Michael Douglas) clothing into a sort of corporate fashion manual in the 1980s. In “Oppenheimer,” the Manhattan Project physicists wear dark, monochromatic suits during college classes and a few neutral, lighter shades during their time at “Los Alamos.” Iconic is the perfect "black tie party tuxedo" worn by the very elegant Robert Downey Jr.
A trait d'union unites the most important manifestation of formal men's fashion with the aesthetics expressed by a Block Buster film narrating events dating back to the mid-twentieth century. But how is it possible that in its essentiality the "specific formal rigor" of classic men's clothing has not changed much in 80 years?
The roots of this phenomenon lie far back in time. During the Renaissance, the Reformed world adopted a series of color ranges including black, bluish black, dark purple, and gray. These colors became a symbol of bourgeois pragmatic authority, traceable in Dutch and Flemish painting which immortalized a new ruling class. The paintings portray individuals dressed in clothing functional to their productive, material or intellectual activities, characteristics of the nascent Calvinist bourgeoisie, careful to avoid any form of bravado or excessive rhetoric.
With the debut of the nineteenth century, men's fashion saw the disappearance of all kinds of frills in favor of an aesthetic concept based on pragmatism and material and moral utilitarianism. The three-piece men's suit spread from the Anglo-Saxon world, consisting of a jacket, waistcoat and ankle-length trousers, made with woolen fabrics dyed in dark, dull colours.
The British psychologist John Flügel, in the work "Psychology of Clothing", claims that the elimination of decorative elements in men's clothing represented what was considered the "Great Renunciation". It happened that for the male gender the concept of fashion transformed into a concept of elegance. In this regard, fashion historian Enrica Morini expresses herself this way:
“The approach to power and its assumption by the bourgeois man led to a codification of his way of dressing which corresponded to the codification of his role. Men's fashion focused on the details: the fabrics, the ties, the waistcoats, but also the perfection of the cut of the clothing, the whiteness and cleanliness, the ironing, the skilful knotting of a tie"
In this context, form and aesthetic perfection precede both color and patterned design, and discreetly "under-statement" elegance finds its own form of distinction in the "right measure". A refinement that has been shared by men who love classic formal elegance for centuries.
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