“He familiarises with, understands, selects and recomposes”: this was Italo Rota talking about Alessandro Michele at the time of his Gucci apotheosis in 2017. But it is also the synthesis of the curatorial vision, of the interpretive living that has been Rota’s own look on the world, along an existence made up of projects, research, collections, provocations, which spanned the last decades and ended last April 6. With a Milanese education – consolidated as a trainee with Albini and Gregotti, and in collaboration with Lotus International magazine in the late 1970s – Rota soon broadened his field of action in every possible direction, in terms of typology as well as geography: as he moved to Paris, where he joined Gae Aulenti for the Musée d'Orsay, theater came, together with set design and product design. With his return to Milan in the following decade, his vision embraced the value of design for the city: these are the years in which he signed the project for the Museo del Novecento, also in Milan, while sharing a different take on the contemporary by teaching – he directed the design course at NABA – collecting, exhibiting, working on temporary dimensions that often resulted in being permanent. That's what he had also done for Domus, when in June 2017, in issue 1014, he interpreted the return of the Domusmoda project, in a cover that re-embraced the panorama of Sottsass and Mendini, and gave him the opportunity to tell us about his own.

This article was originally published on the attached Domusmoda, June  2017.

Italo Rota, architect and extraordinary thinker, condenses his view of the evolution of humankind (and dressing) in a tableau made for Domus Moda. He explains how today’s urban plan is made up of clothing in movement

Carlo Antonelli: The story behind our cover is that in order to go out into the world, survive and evolve, people need to clothe themselves.
Italo Rota: So right from the start, the problem is rich and complex. You need trousers, jackets, travel bags and especially shoes. You can’t go anywhere without shoes. Archaeology shows how refined travel wear has been.

 If you look at Ötzi the Iceman, his goat-hide coat was black-and-white striped. Ötzi, who lived 5,300 years ago, is a mummy that was found in the Alps in 1991. He’s now on display at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. He was found fully dressed in different layers of clothing, and equipped with containers to carry all sorts of things. The extraordinary thing is that his wardrobe is both sophisticated and functional. His equipment was complementary to his dress, just like our fashion accessories are today. He had this mini axe in very pure copper. The Domus Moda cover represents how clothes today are still made for travelling, although we also use them for our sedentary world, because they’re comfortable. From an ideological point of view, they are the minimal layer that stands between our body and our dreams of utopia, what we hope to achieve. I think that making clothes lighter has to do with the need to make this specific membrane thinner in order to better experience the interior of our vision. If you look at science-fiction movies, over the decades, the characters’ outfits have gradually dematerialised. They wear leotards.

So generally speaking, we have been heading toward a second skin for 50 years now.
Yes, because we have arrived inside the visions we designed.

What do you mean by designed visions?
The world we are constructing and in which we live. Finally, after long years, we have the luxury of dreaming and exploring again. That doesn’t mean we no longer enjoy seeing people dressed in Gucci. Reciprocal observation between different groups of people has always existed, but now, metropolitan tribes are producing particularly spectacular results. A great thing to see is a woman in a nondescript tracksuit accompanied by a guy dressed in Gucci. They sort of snap together aesthetically. 

I don’t know if Alessandro Michele, the creative director at Gucci, is a genius, but he sure is bright. He familiarises with, understands, selects and recomposes. This type of operation is fundamental nowadays, much more pertinent than a brilliant creative professional waking up in the morning and drawing a sketch. Gucci seems to involve all its people and internal resources toward a common goal. People with very organised thoughts can put together an entire production cycle sitting at a desk, and arrive at amazing results immediately. At least that’s what it looks like from the outside. When I see Gucci clothes, they suggest an efficient and economical production chain.

What is the other suit on the cover?
Yohji Yamamoto designed it with Adidas for Virgin Galactic.

For the pilots or the travellers?
To travel into outer space. That’s still our main stimulus, and has been forever. We have studied the stars since ancient times, even before we studied our own planet. Maybe it’s the desire to leave. This suit is a typical example of the need to have only the bare minimum between our skin and our dream.

What about the furry costumes by the American fabric sculptor Nick Cave that we see on the cover?
Cave represents the extension of the garment as an extension of the mind, something we also see with Michele’s clothes for Gucci. What I think is that those costumes are not the stuff of dreams or imagination, but something we have already seen. They are prostheses that satisfy the psyche, not just the eyes. They are a projection of our interior world more than a product of culture.

Why are you so interested in walking?
Because it helps me think. Walking equals thinking. I walk all the time; I can’t stand being cooped up inside the house. I conduct flâneries, which by tradition, per definition, take place in the city. 

Italo Rota

Flânerie does not include arriving at the limit, for example between city and countryside. In the city, flânerie happens inside the large interior of the metropolis. It’s so large that it is practically without limits. To arrive at the limit of the metropolis is an actual project, and a flâneur has no aim. A big theoretic project you could pose is “How do I get lost?” That’s a complex project. We always know where we are, thanks to global positioning systems. In order to get lost, you need to deliberately organise disconnection.

A walk in the city is like perusing a large interior, where the streets are the hallways. This interior-like experience is changing how we look at architecture and urban planning. We no longer can contemplate buildings as being architecture. They are like the large objects in a supermarket. Walking through the city is like browsing the chair department of a store. When you go to an archaeological area (buildings without roofs), it’s an interior in the shape of an exterior. You come across all kinds of interior/exterior categories: the interior of an interior, the exterior of an interior, and the interior of an exterior. These categories come alive when invaded by humans, so the real city is made up of bodies clad in fabric. When you walk, you come across dressed groups of people, different tribes. You can observe that the actual urban plan is composed of clothing, which becomes the urban fabric. The cloth becomes visible when crowds become masses. Just crowds are not enough to make urban fabric. That’s the difference between Fifth Avenue in New York and any street in Mumbai or Shanghai. You don’t see the same things.

We’ve been seeing a comeback of ornamentation. People enjoy decorating themselves, and this feeling has triumphed in fashion, too.
If you imagine an hourglass shape, the narrow part is like a needle’s eye. A few things come out and then explode in space and time, like in the 1960s. Think of the famous scene in Federico Fellini’s movie Roma (1972), where the Vatican holds an extravagant fashion show with priests and nuns in bizarre outfits. It represents the luxury of religion turning into individual religion, where every person is his own pope. The only example of men with feathers, jewels and mitres are bishops, but this is seen in every religion on the planet, including Taoism and Hinduism. Look at the Ethiopian priests in Addis Ababa. We have taken this up in our daily lives. Religion has become democratised through vestimentary luxury, just like design was democratised with plastic. Fellini’s scene was a fundamental moment; we can use it to describe what happened after. The clothes Fellini designed back then were beyond good and evil. There’s the movie Salomè by Carmelo Bene (also 1972), where everybody wore phosphorescent tunics. It’s the degeneration of the ritual dress of religion. Look at Salvatore Ferragamo’s shoes from the 1950s and early 1960s: they were the kind popes wore. First religion became minimalist, and then democratic. Church architecture became abstract, with just one cross on the wall inside. Minimalist boutiques were the same: one T-shirt on display. Even the body of Christ disappeared from the cross.

The sacramental, the oneiric and the psychic?
There are other phenomena that show these things. For example, when Louis Vuitton teamed up with the elderly Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. I don’t know the reasons behind the decision, but she made products and pop-up shop interiors for them under Marc Jacobs. This represents how the mind is coming out from behind the eyes, mind over body. This is seen in Kusama’s work, and hers are the most beautiful fashion-related stores I have seen in the past 20 years.

She works from inside a hospital for the mentally ill, to which she voluntarily committed herself.

If you look at a picture of the store she designed in New York, it’s amazing. Because it’s not a dream, it’s visceral distress, and it makes you want to discover what’s behind the distress. Great things are contained in distress. As soon as it gets recognised, it’s a joy. Meaning that you live with it, but you no longer need to solve it. If you want, you can solve it; if you don’t, you just identify it. If you have a problem with your father, your mother or with emptiness, whatever, you do something with it. Sometimes you bottle it up to extract a creative profile from it. Artists do not generally seek psychoanalysis. In order to make discoveries and extraordinary projects, you don’t need to go to an analyst. There is an individual psychic dimension that sometimes generates a collective psyche that degenerates.

An interesting thing that has happened is that the accumulation and ostentation of wealth are no longer considered disorders. They have been removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association. There is public exhibition and interiorised exhibition in the world of fashion victims. They always accumulate against someone. Clothing is used to expel someone from your space by the display of accumulation, which is a museum concept. In fashion, people use all the techniques of museums: showcase, archive and masterpiece.

Opening image: Photo Comune di Reggio Nell'Emilia on Flickr