Making waves: Giacomo Balla and Emilio Pucci

Abstract

Emilio Pucci emerged as an international fashion force in the 1960s with his bold and brilliant, streamlined outfits for the active woman. Delving into Pucci's first career as a bomber pilot and Fascist aviation hero, this article demonstrates his unacknowledged debt to the fashion theories and textile designs of the Futurist Giacomo Balla. Pucci was linked to Futurist aeropittura of the 1930s by the common culture of Fascism, aviation, and the cult of speed. Though Futurism was tainted by its affiliation with Fascism, in the post-war years, the works of Balla and others were kept in the public eye through exhibitions and their influence on a younger generation of modernist artists. In the same period, Pucci began to produce his vibrant eye-popping textile designs, which elaborated the proto-psychedelic imagery of wave-like swells, spinning vortexes, and exuberant floral arabesques developed by Balla between the World Wars.

Keywords::

• Futurism
• Fascism
• aeropittura
• aviation
• psychedelic
• Apollo 15

Notes

¹ I first suggested that Balla's ‘geometric exuberance and ice-cream colours’ anticipated Pucci's prints in my article ‘Futurist fashion: three manifestos’ (Braun 1995, 36). I thank Eugenia Paulicelli for encouraging me to pursue the thesis further in a paper given at the conference ‘Fashion+Film: The 1960s Revisited’, which she co-organized for the CUNY Graduate Center, Spring 2010 and to contribute to this special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. All translations are by the author unless otherwise indicated.

² See, for example, Valerie Steele (2003, 24–25, and 129, note 22) citing the ‘knockout clothes’, ‘the most striking color combinations’, ‘the wildest prints’ described in ‘Dramatic Decade of Italian Style’ Life 1961 (1 December): 66–69.

³ This information on Pucci's military career is found in documents dated 9 May and 21 June 1943, respectively and located in the Segretaria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario, f. 553.815, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome. I am grateful to the historian and archivist Alessando Visani for procuring these documents and for his research on Pucci's military career on my behalf.

⁴ Segretaria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario, f. 553.815, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome.

⁵ Kennedy (1991, 24–25) states that Pucci returned to Italy in the autumn of 1946.

⁶ ‘An Italian skier designs’, Harper's Bazaar (14 December 1948), reproduced in Le Bourhis (1996, 25).

⁷ These series of works were probably painted in the immediate post-war period with their roots in Balla's series of watercolors of chromatic gradations from his 1912 sketchbooks, and possibly one large oil and pastel on canvas. For the debate on the dating of these works, see Lista (2008b, 76–81).

⁸ Ricci (1994, 325) writes that Pucci's formal and chromatic solutions ‘seem to reprise some concepts already expressed by the Futurists’ but does not delve further. For a disclaimer as to the possible influence of Second Futurism upon him, see Ricci (1996, 98–99, note 39): ‘all this is to say that, as far as Emilio Pucci is concerned, the apparent affinities with the world of contemporary art arise from his intensive way of breathing in the atmosphere of his own times’. Notably, Ricci fails to consider Pucci's ‘own time’ including the 1930s and the war years, when Futurist aeropittura was omnipresent.

⁹ An exception is Giovanna Uzzani (1996, 125–127).

¹⁰ In what could be an image by Balla, Casadio (1998, 18) describes Pucci's palette as ‘fuschia and geranium, moon and peacock blue, lavender and banana, forest green, musk mint green, pale green … a series of over a hundred hues and gradations’.

¹¹ Giacomo Balla, ‘The Antineutral Suit: Futurist Manifesto’, translated and reprinted in Braun (1995, 39).

¹² Volt, ‘Futurist Manifesto of Women's Fashion’, translated and reprinted in Braun (1995, 40).