Chanel and the Tweed revolution.

Una massima di Coco, Ricucire il Futuro, Its Tam Biella

The exhibition "Ricucire il futuro", a project entirely conceived and developed by the students of the ITS TAM of Biella coordinated by Prof. Silvia Moglia, director of the institute, will be exhibited as part of the fifty-sixth edition of Filo. The exhibition/installation was born as a tribute to the great couturière Coco Chanel on the fiftieth anniversary of her death and, through an accurate work of analysis, understanding and design, retraces the founding aspects of the Maison's taste, starting from the twenties of the last century up to our time and its themes.

Among the many values that can be identified, the exhibition is undoubtedly a stimulating reflection on the revolution that the designer has brought to the construction technique of draping fabrics adapting them to her concept of feminine style made of a wise alchemy of logic, rigor, elegance and beauty.

The concept of Tweed

A Chanel-taste Tweed, From the exhibition "Mending the Future" ITS TAM Biella

The beginning of the route sees a very young Coco go beyond the exoticism of Poiret and the sumptuousness of Worth using male fabrics designed for noble "gentleman farmers" in moments of leisure, sports and hunting activities. This type of fabrics, characterized by the homespun carded spinning of native wools from the various British Isles to "Mademoiselle" seemed suitable for the essential style of its packaging to be contrasted with fashion inspired by Art Deco.

These fabrics, still available, can be generically defined as "Tweed", but for careful analysis they lend themselves to being classified more precisely. Cheviot and Harris are the heaviest, most bristly and nerviest products produced with wool from Northumberland and the Hebrides respectively. The latter are still entirely made with artisanal methods in the archipelago and are guaranteed bythe traditional "The Harris Tweed Orb Mark", the recognizable symbol in the shape of a globe surmounted by the Maltese cross and decorated with 13 symbolic precious stones. The Shetland, coming from the homonymous territory, is sweeter in hand, while particularly characteristic is the Donegal, a Tweed produced in Ireland with the peculiar properties of showing on the surface of the fabric a series of wool buttons in contrasting colors with respect to the bottom and to be strictly woven in plain weave compared to the other tweed mentioned, which are instead woven with 4 harness base weave.

Coco's Revolution

The fabrics mentioned were not very suitable for the production of women's clothes, although dry and essential; Prof. Margherita Rosina,professor of History and Documentation of Fashion at the State University of Milan, can help us understand what was the first transformation of The Chanel Tweed.

As happened on other occasions, Coco had a tendency to romanticize her work experiences; in fact, resorting as before to the albums of trends published in those years, you can easily see that French producer such as Meyer and Rodier, at the end of the twenties, had in their catalog wonderful carded wools, light and very soft, only apparently similar to Scottish tweeds. It is possible that these samples, dating back to 1928-1929, were created under the impulse of Chanel which, thanks to the undisputed notoriety it now enjoyed, certainly had the power to influence the creatives of the time in the textile sector. It was probably by using intermediaries such as Rodier that, before 1930, Mademoiselle began to make weavers work for herself around Bohain; there are oral testimonies of his visit "vêtue d'un tailleur rouge" to the Bourgeois company in Maretz, where a dozen handlooms dedicated to a niche production for haute couture worked. The next step was the acquisition of the company itself and the restructuring of the factory, which from the local cadastre appears to be, starting from 1932, identified as "Lainages et jerseys Chanel".

Figura 1:Coco Chanel, tailleur, 1927, tweed in wool and silk chiffon - The Metropolitan Museum, NY.:

As is known, the couturière had a long retirement close to the Second World War and returned only in 1954, in a scene manned by Maison Dior and the New Look. This time the success came from the United States where the Chanel suit was imposed, a noble combination of the designer's sartorial art and the creativity of the Linton Tweeds wool mill; iconic is the pink image of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy on the day of the dramatic event in Dallas.

Analyzing the images of that period we can glimpse the characteristics of the "Tweed Chanel taste" of our contemporaneity, which exploits the enormous progress made in the technique of modern fantasy twisters. Also, in this market segment the wool mills of the Italian textile districts have been able to become world leaders in the design and production of this kind of fabrics.

Spinning knot effects, flames, bouclé and frisé are expertly woven with open mock leno weave, in which the untying allows the fancy yarns to float on the surface of the fabric while the necessary consistency and binding is guaranteed by finer combed yarns that work in canvas.

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