Walter Albini, the exhibition on the stylist in Florence

«MHe is touched by the demon of mediocrity, has a story worthy of a great acrobat, all flights towards the heights of success, some falls in the safety net. Her career is easily divided into periods, like that of Picasso.” While in 1979 the journalist Adriana Mulassano thus summarized the essence of Walter Albini, those “periods” were already changing the course of Italian fashion. Great stylist (a word that, it seems, was created for him by the journalist Anna Piaggi), creator of our concept of total look, this star of our local ready-to-wear it had time to shine for over two decades and to fade for almost forty years without ever completely dying out.

Walter Albini, the exhibition

Indeed, resurrected in these times to unleash our imagination: if last year the relaunch of the brand was announced (which stopped in 1983 following its premature death), we will discover a lot about him in the exhibition Walter Albini. The talent, the stylist curated by Enrica Morini and Daniela Degl’Innocenti at the Prato Textile Museum, from March 23rd to September 22nd.

A rich and unpublished archive of creations, drawings, photos, documents and books belonging to Albini himself, analyzed to understand his extraordinary creativity, from his first steps in 1959 until his death. «What emerged in many interviews? His desire to escape boredom. So he always renewed himself with new realities and beautiful collections »says Daniela Degl’Innocenti. «He experienced many ups and downs, he needed to collapse to be reborn, dreaming of times and cultures far from him. Certainly not an abstract artist, but a true designer: a ready-to-wear supply chain had to be created in Italy. And if he hadn’t been more than concrete, he would never have made it.”

An announced success

Born in Busto Arsizio in 1941, Albini designed clothes from an early age «… only clothes. I traced photographs and drawings from magazines and I always liked to change something.” After a year of high school, his parents supported him in choosing an art institute in Turin for fashion design (where he managed to access though the school was all-girls). He dreams of Paris but, at the end of his studies, a bad accident and the death of his father force him to Milan, where he made his mark as an illustrator. In a short time he comes credited for portraying the Florentine parades at Palazzo Pitti and even those in Paris.

With meritocratic foresight, an editor-in-chief sets the record straight: too good to continue immortalizing other people’s ideas, Walter must create something of his own. And so, finally in Paris, he meets Krizia. A partnership that lasted until 1967: with her, in Milan, he created the clothes with which the designer would debut in 1964 at Palazzo Pitti. Together they also developed the knitwear that made Krizia famous, then entrusted to Albini himself. «Everyone talked about him: this is why at the beginning we only studied, without external opinions.

Made history for its Great Gatsby style look and for his dreamy gaze towards the past, with Krizia his debut was actually decidedly pop!» specifies Enrica Morini. «His process also changed based on the whirlwind change of producers and distributors that characterized him. He read the changes in society, and if those who worked alongside him didn’t support him (also due to his somewhat unpredictable character) the relationship was severed. After the classic 70s trips to India, he proposed his idea of ​​very elegant folk, then arriving at looks of luminous decadence of an 80s femme fatale.”

In 1967, Vogue Italia featured proposals from numerous brands designed by Albini who, for the first time, is cited as creative. His collections bring a romantic revival, to return to the beaches of Biarritz or the myth of Hollywood. They support the mission inherent for him in «anticipating taste, on the one hand, but on the other trying to guide it where it is fragile, or it isn’t there, or it’s bad.” He was the first to start creating total looks, but not “tailor-made”.

If the new fashion was to be reborn between classical manufacturing and intellectual industry, the suit industrially manufactured and sold by size began to be designed by new freelance creatives: a path that in those years saw Albini but also Karl Lagerfeld as protagonists (busy between Fendi, Chloé and Chanel). Collaborations follow one another and with a new Venetian producer, Papini, Walter finally conquers the position of creative director for the Misterfox brand. Strong passion for deco and for those 1920s that he will always love as much as Coco Chanel, celebrated in subsequent collections: «”It is the era from which the only valid fashion messages come, which revolutionized a way of dressing and thinking ».

He moves between Milan, Venice and the Tunisian residence of Sidi Bou Said. Tuning into «… a need to change inside and out, to have new experiences, to have new adventures, to cancel taboos», Albini has no doubts. With him, Milan will become the new stage of fashion. And so in 1971, for the first time, with its three “unitary fashion shows”, hundreds of models designed for five brands specialized in different fields were presented and combined together in different releases . A prelude to what would finally debut in 1973 as WA, a brand in his name presented with a fashion show in London. The second, surprising, will be staged at the Caffè Florian in Venice, while for the third he will choose a return to the capital of high fashion, Rome. An unscheduled presentation, the morning after Valentino Garavani’s important fashion show: «He had courage, everyone could have left… And instead everyone stayed, proclaiming his success!» adds Daniela Degl’Innocenti.

Fantasy, wildness and genius

Despite his elegance, Albini’s irreverence was always a matter of soul, certainly not of pose. In 1974, instead of a fashion show, he organized an exhibition of his works in Milan. In the Fiorucci restaurant, for a subsequent presentation, the clothes were displayed on busts that bore casts of his face. And it is still one of his masks with which, in a Milanese gallery, he exhibited on panels garments requested from friends, interpreted according to his own style (shortly afterwards, in another gallery, he decorated phalluses with a sculpture effect with the stylistic features of famous designer of the time).

Even when he decided to propose high fashion, he chose to amaze. At the Vivai del Sud in Rome, the collection dedicated to pink was celebrated with the scent of an artist’s “flavor-spreading machine”, a lunch in rosy shades and as a soundtrack 27 versions of La vie en rose. «Breakthrough collections were “Guerriglia Urbana” in 1976 and the following, more folk. In the first, thanks to the difficult political situation of the time, proposing women with faces covered by balaclavas was a provocation that gave him many problems. She was inspired by sport, by work, with outerwear with raw cut hems to save money and make the garments more accessible. From then on his fashion was more concrete: sweaters, capes, more masculine garments» says Morini, underlining how the absence of a solid production and marketing structure had already begun to undermine its reality compared to brands such as Armani and Versace.

He passed away at the age of 42, in 1983. In one of his latest interviews he describes the woman he always wanted to dress: «Not too sporty, but with the look of someone who plays sports… She smokes a lot, travels, isn’t necessarily married. She works, but she seems perpetually on holiday. She has style, elegant, mysterious, alone, adaptable but not engaging. She is not necessarily beautiful, but certainly irresistible.”

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