What is fashion? A decorous appeal to cover up our nudity or the need to protect our body?
Is it a label of social status? Or a symbol of freedom?
Is it a world in which desires and ambitions can be achieved or merely a superficial industry feeding on our dreams? It doesn’t matter. Fashion has always represented, and always will represent, the promise of a supreme form of “beauty”.
Fashion as a philosophy of beauty, and therefore of aesthetics, may also be interpreted as the quest for an understanding of our senses, by analysing the force of human reactions that these senses provoke.
Asserting one’s own desires through an image. Appearing more beautiful and more attractive in order to feel admired and capable of dominating other people. Perfumes, cosmetics, jewellery have been used since ancient times in a subtle game of seduction, eroticism and power.
For centuries, precious fabrics and unique forms of clothing have been crafted to emphasise the different features of male and female bodies.
The ephemeral is not actually so transitory or fleeting because it has the power to awaken our innermost desires: a plunging neckline allowing a glimpse of the female breast triggers a game of power and conquest that is hard to resist.
People in antiquity were well aware of this, and were masters in the language of aesthetics. Asserting your own taste indicates a great political strength, but imposing your own fashion involves directing the product market associated with it.
Venice, especially during the Renaissance, dictated its own laws in this respect.
During the thirteenth century, the fashion industry was so important that the State felt obliged to protect and regulate the production of fabric, clothing, footwear and accessories by means of “Schools” for arts and crafts.
Starting in the Palazzo Mocenigo Museum (Study Centre for the History of Textiles and Costumes), we will dive back into the past to witness displays of traditional eighteenth-century dresses and lace, set in the splendour of a residence that once belonged to a highly influential family in the Venetian Republic.
We will then continue on, passing places that once played host to the most important market in Europe – Rialto – to admire the skilled movements of the “Calegheri” (shoe-makers) who still handcraft fine footwear today. Immersed in the buzz of Venetian chatter we will see jewellery crafted by new designers, who merge traditional materials with modern forms. Finally, our fashion journey will end at the Grand Canal in the prestigious setting of one of the most esteemed textile industries in the world.
