The Bite Magazine - Spring/Summer 2020 - Issue 27

bite book review B IANCA E B LU M ONICA B OLZONI Jada Brookes looks at the Bianca e Blu Monica Bolzoni book curated by Master’s Degree students at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne and is fascinated with how they have collated extracts of independent designer Monica Bolzoni’s work. I n 2016, designer Monica Bolzoni described her in- dependent fashion brand Bianca e Blu as “already there.” She went on to say, “It is feminine and mascu- line. It is ambiguous.” Curated by ECAL (Ècole Can- tole D’art de Lausanne) director Alexis Georgacopoulos and students at the internationally renowned ECAL/Uni- versity of Art and Design Lausanne, Switzerland, Bianca e Blu Monica Bolzoni is a structured ABC book that reflects the multiple facets of the brand through a wealth of visual material from the company’s archives. The brand was also described as “one of the greatest artis- tic personalities of this century” by Vogue Italia , perhaps because Monica Bolzoni’s designs anticipated many of the concepts of today’s fashion, such as modularity and tailor- ing. Through drawings, vintage images, fabrics, accesso- ries, artworks, film stills, and stage images accompanied by critical texts, press cuttings, and interviews, the Mas- ter’s Degree students from the university produced new fashion stories and fresh graphic identity for the brand. In the chapter ‘A Maieutic Approach to Style’ Vittoria Ca- terina Caratozzola, an author of several books on fashion, gives an outline of the project curated by the Masters' Degree students in Type Design and Photography at the ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne who, after attending a workshop held by art director Régis Tosetti and associate professor Davide Fornari at the university, set about producing a typographic and photographic de- sign in book form in honour of Monica Bolzoni’s brand. Vittoria describes Monica’s journey of working as a fash- ion coordinator at Franck Olivier in Paris and Fiorucci in New York before returning to Milan to become an inde- pendent fashion designer. How she felt the “typical Italian fashion of the early 1980s, as embodied by Stillsmo, struck a discordant note with the way she interpreted fashion,” and speaks about the clash of fashion in the 1970s, an overflow from the characteristics of the previous decade, followed by a takeover of the sex and violence of the punk era. We learn about the designer’s concept of the Bianca e Blu shop, the legacy of another entrepreneurial story, and her plans to revamp and give it a new creative direction and commercial enterprise without changing its name, upon taking over the premises at 53 via De Amicia, Milan in 1980. Decorated with iconic objects such as “huge glass panels reminiscent of the Chanel atelier at Rue Cambon in Paris and Andy Warhol uncannily re-embodied as a mannequin nicknamed Ken” it would have painted an at- tractive picture. Interestingly, through Monica’s concept of her new brand, Bianca e Blu fashion models were “not modelled on the silhouette of the ideal body or imposed as fashion narra- tive about an imaginary ‘character’ to be emulated or to be used for projecting individual self-image. They were effec- tively the outcome of a design method that, by pairing the body and its proportions to geometric shapes, and in par- ticular to the rectangle, perfected wearability as a system.” The reason behind this approach is that Monica believed, “Clothing design has to deal with the problem of the fit: from the study of shapes, we can infer that it is not a mat- ter of thinking of the dress on the body, but the body in the dress.” Before making this a fact, the designer tested this concept on herself, using her size 42 (14 in UK sizes) fit but with the imperfection of corporeality and subject- ed herself to hours and hours of try-ons, experimenting and verifying her thoughts on herself, in corpore vili (low body). The chapter reveals her original approach was to challenge the concentration of the 1980s fashion system on the per- fection of supermodels as her way of democratising beau- ty. She aimed to enhance the singularity of each woman in opposition to current mainstream fashion hype and of- fered her clients - according to their own particular body shape - imagination, comfort, and personal choice as well as the opportunity to select and adapt garments and pair these with an array of accessories. In alphabetical order, Bianca e Blu Monica Bolzoni is like a collage of ideas in word and picture form that describes the brand in its many facets. The small section on Acces- sories said to be key to the success of Bianca e Blu includ- ed gloves, collars, jewels, bags, hats and headpieces, and underwear. One of the pictures features a model in a wide fire-red woollen vest styled with a bicoloured cloche hat and veil mantle, pendant earrings, and collars, all by Bi- anca e Blu, completed with gloves with zipper by Prada. The text describes the brand’s use of accessories as, “On