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Mad (Wo)Man
A choreography of alternation is what is being staged by Frankie Morello today: if the femininity of the cuts nods to the sartorial tradition of the Fifties, the masculinity of the outerwear breaks the “tailored” mould of the volumes, which explode like abstract ideas; while the yells of the beauty salon and the appearance of hair curler-accessories refer to the stereotype of America’s ideal wife, that trademark called irony bursts forth in the form of thousands of precious golden hairdresser’s clips, applied by hand to trains and evening gowns, as if to symbolise that sophisticated elusiveness that the “throwaway” trends of fast fashion tend to censor.
Frankie Morello has grown. Irreverence steps aside in favour of aesthetic abstraction, total provocation bows to awareness, the rock&roll attitude to cultured experimentation, and the eletronic gig to classical performance. Maurizio Modica and Pierfrancesco Gigliotti say:“The fruit of this new existential phase is an abstract, rarefied and, above all, ironic woman.
For us, the Fifties represent the ultimate heights of elegance, absolutely unrepeatable and unreachable. The idea was to fiercely de-contextualise them, mixing pure citations with digressions, in the volumes, in the forms, in the materials, and to play around the alternating concepts of male and female”. To not remain tied to the stereotypes, such as the be-skirted housewife getting dinner ready for her husband (a classic of “Mad Man”-style American advertising), but to relaunch a new concept of elegance that doesn’t forget its origins:
“The Italian take on these years of the Fifties lies in the choice of heavy wools for the big men’s coats, combining these chunky shapes with very feminine clothes, and in having avoided, especially in the colours, the candy-wrapper stereotype of the pin-up girl”.
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