-
5. Futurist Accessories
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
5 FUTURIST ACCESSORIES FrancaZoccoli “The Futurist hat shall be asymmetrical and in aggressive, festive colours. Futurist shoes shall be dynamic, each of a diƒerent shape and colour.”1 “The Futurist tie, an anti-tie of hard-wearing, shiny, lightweight metal, . . . fully reflects the sun and the blue skies that enrich us as Italians, banishing the melancholy pessimistic look from the breasts of our menfolk.”2 In various manifestos, the Futurists proclaimed a revolution in accessories, which complemented, or rather, was integral to, their revolution in clothing. Many of the artists in the movement put theory into practice. For instance, Giacomo Balla, but also Enrico Prampolini, Tullio Crali, Tato (Gugliemo Sansoni), Gerardo Dottori, Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles), and Mino Delle Site, to name but a few, created scarves and shawls, buckles and buttons, bags and umbrellas, necklaces and bracelets. This did not cause, however, a shift in fashion trends that immediately influenced what was seen on the street—nor was it meant to. The Futurists never really aimed to place their products on the market or make them part of a process of mass production; the objects they created were handcrafted and often one-oƒs. These items always held a high ideological quotient because their ultimate purpose was to challenge bourgeois convention. Art historian Enrico Crispolti, who more than any other has studied the phenomenon of Futurism and fashion, argues that “every component, every clothing accessory . . . becomes . . . the di- rect and ideologically auto-representative sign of a provocative presence of the ‘new’ in everyday life.”3 Items of clothing can communicate, and their wordless, clear, immediate language has attracted the attention of sociologists and semioticians. “Fashion,” writes Roland Barthes, “exists as a system of signifiers.”4 The invention of striking and dynamic clothing accessories is true to the spirit of the Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo5 (The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe) that was meant to spread to every sphere of human activity and influence all aspects of life, making it joyful and charged with imagination. The first Futurist accessory was the tie that Balla designed in 1912, with its brightly colored, forceful lines.6 It is also a work of some importance in the history of art, given that those years witnessed the beginning of abstract painting, the birth of which is traditionally taken to be 1910, the year of Wassily Kandinsky’s first nonobjective watercolor. It is significant that the Futurists’ joyous revolution of the wardrobe started with this particular item of male clothing, this bourgeois fetish, the tie for all seasons that has proven so resilient. After the first tie, Balla produced others in rapid succession. Later, he published Il manifesto futurista del vestito da uomo (The Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing), first as a leaflet in French (May 20, 1914),7 and then in Italian (September 11, 1914) under a new title Il vestito antineutrale (The Antineutral Suit), undoubtedly renamed on F. T. Marinetti’s insistence. By then, the Great War had begun and the leader of Futurism was an interventionist.8 His influence can also be detected in the choice of publication date, the fateful 11th, eleven being a particularly auspicious number for Marinetti. Such details, however, are merely circumstantial and of limited interest; what is important is the content of the manifesto, an out-and-out attack on the dour seriousness and conservative, passatist nature of men’s clothing. From the very first edition, various design models were illustrated in the manifesto, the most audacious being the “red, one-piece suit of the Futurist painter Carrà” (Carrà referring to the artist who was to wear the suit, rather than its designer). In the sketch we see two intersecting triangles from which head, hands, and feet emerge; where the two triangles meet we see the genitals, represented as two balls and an arrow pointing upward. Although it was announced as forthcoming, a manifesto on women’s clothing did not 5 5 / F U T U R I S T A C C E S S O R I E S [44.200.39.110] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:49 GMT) immediately follow. Of all possible accessories, the one that the Futurists focused on with such insistence was the tie, that symbolic accompaniment to any suit. In this field, Balla was not just the first but also the most prolific and most imaginative designer. Indeed , he worked on a vast number of ties, often brightly colored...