‘Clothes are my children’: what remains of Walter Albini?

Hiii,

The Museo del Tessuto in Prato, opened on 23 March, an exhibition dedicated to the father of Italian prêt-a-porter: Walter Albini. More than 1700 objects, including documents, drawings, sketches and photographs, trace the artistic life, and not, of the great Italian fashion designer, who died at the age of 42 in the 1980s due to AIDS.

If one wants to highlight the most important features of Albini’s career, one should certainly mention his beginning as an illustrator for haute couture fashion shows for newspapers and magazines of the time, first in Rome and later in Paris.

Like any self-respecting city, however big it may be, there are always the usual three places.

It was in those same three places that a meeting between Albini and YSL probably took place. The two, in fact, share certain ideologies and styles, so much so that Albini is often referred to as the Italian YSL, precisely to indicate the similarities between the two.

I recommend a beautiful article by Giuliana Matarrese in Linkiesta Etc, where she talks in more detail about what Albini was, including his parallelism with YSL.
He was the first designer to introduce the unisex, or better to say unimax, one of the first to talk about society within a fashion show, we remember the AI76/77 Guerriglia Urbana fashion show, with the models who walked the runway wearing balaclavas; and the great irony that often characterised him, we remember the exhibition of phalluses inspired by the creative directors and pop icons of those years, inside the Eros Gallery.

We could also mention the great change that Albini brought about within the Italian fashion system; in fact, he was responsible for the definition of many of fashion’s cornerstones, not at the level of creation, but at the level of affirmation. In fact, Albini was considered a true art director and stylist of his collections.

These characteristics come to the fore in the short film called ‘Dietro l’immagine’ (Behind the Image), presented at the CityLife Anteo, followed by a talk, moderated by Giuliana Matarrese, with some of the personalities who took part in the making of Albini’s projection and life, including Carla Sozzani, Paolo Rinaldi and Emmanuele Randazzo.

The short film focuses on the great love Albini had for the world of photography, a bond that also emerges from the designer’s creations and the presentations he made over the years; such as the one inside the Galleria Marconi, where the collection he designed was displayed through photographs of him wearing the clothes. The photographs were taken by very important photographers of the time, and friends of Albini, such as Aldo Ballo, Maria Vittoria Backhaus and Alfa Castaldi.

The short film is made up of six interviews/interventions: it opens with Lucia Miodini, head of the media and fashion section of the Communication Studies and Archives Centre of the University of Parma, and then gives the floor to the four photographers who worked closely with Albini. The first, Maria Vittoria Backhaus, followed by Fabio Castaldi, Fiorenzo Niccoli and Emmanuele Randazzo. The short film closes with a speech by the masterful Carla Sozzani, who recalls, with much love and nostalgia, Albini’s golden years and praises his genius.

She herself, shortly afterwards, will be the protagonist together with Randazzo and Paolo Rinaldi, Albini’s historical inside arm and partner in the previously mentioned talk.
The whole talk opens with Carla Sozzani’s affirmation of how many people do not know Albini’s genius: perhaps because we have few books about him? Was his world short-lived because of his untimely death? Did the brand not survive because there was no big investor like Kering or LVMH to keep it going? Remember that it was only in 2023 that the brand was bought to be relaunched by Bidayat.

There are many questions and just as many answers we can give ourselves.

Precisely in 2023, when the intellectual patrimony and part of the archives were bought, the most papable name for the creative direction of the brand was that of Alessandro Michele, the very one who most remembers and recalls Albini today; from the shots of Gucci’s ‘HA HA’ campaign with Harry Styles, to the last collection presented to the creative direction of Valentino.