Roberto Capucci's 'Art Into Fashion' at the Art Museum (1st review)

"Luxury is an art, like painting or sculpture, with its own scheme," contends the renowned Italian designer Roberto Capucci, the subject of the current spectacular exhibit at the Art Museum. Capucci's luxuriant creations are categorized as fashion, but they challenge any lingering notions of function raised by the word. In his long career, Capucci walked an artistic path of his own imagining, directed by ideas that bore little connection to commercial norms of fashion.

To be sure, fashion and art have never been strangers; clothing designers make statements that may be as compelling and unique as those of artists in any other genre. It's assumed that fashion designers will use the artistic vocabulary of line, form, color, texture and balance, and trust the human body to bring the work to life with grace and movement.

Pity his models

But Capucci, while a master of that vocabulary— especially when it comes to form and gorgeous, searing color— often sidesteps or even ignores the component of the human body. Videos in the exhibit show models wearing his designs, but the clothes seemed jerky and awkward in motion.

Capucci's designs are sculpture in the round; they display an inherent sense of movement in their construction. Yet they're at their best in repose under the exhibit's dramatic lighting. His clothes— mainly formal and semi-formal dresses— are stunning, even astonishing, but they can't truly be called fashion, at least not as the word relates to something meant to be worn.

This distinction, however, matters little. Only by setting it aside can you appreciate Capucci for what he is: a masterful architect, a witty engineer, an ingenious sculptor, a showman and entertainer.

Capucci's trump card is color; he's a painter with a rich, unlimited palette. When it comes to form, nature is the prevailing agent for Capucci's aesthetic.

Inspired by a pond

The silk taffeta Nove Gonne (Nine Dresses) dress from 1956, with an undulating layered hem said to have been inspired by ripples in a pond, socks the eye with a rich eyeful of bright cadmium. His 1989 Evening Dress sprouts a lush seaweed-like trail of ruffles down the skirt in impossibly beautiful rich pinks, purples, reds and deep greens.

The Bougainvillea dress, from the same period, blossoms in ruffles, unfurling similar rich colors up the body. A dress from 1972 features a riverbed motif of pebbles strewn across the bodice and shoulders, and another has a belt and trim of bamboo.

Several of Capucci's most memorable designs come toward the end of the chronologically arranged show, when pleats, strips of fabric, folds and ruffles fly in all directions in a giddy play of imagination. Capucci fittingly used the generic title "Sculpture Dress" for many of his creations. Sculpture is a wide-ranging category expressed in many mediums, and this exhibit clearly demonstrates Capucci's exalted standing in the genre.♦


To read another review by Martha Ledger, click here.