The Impact of Traditional Indian Clothing on Italian Fashion Design from Germana Marucelli to Gianni Versace

Abstract

This article explores the complex relationship between traditional Indian clothing and Italian fashion design, from the mid-1950s to the 1990s.An atmosphere of reciprocity characterized the encounter between Indian and Italian representatives at the First International Clothing Conference, held in Venice in September 1956. The All India Handloom Board had been trying for some years to put traditional fabrics on the international map: it was the ideal moment for Marucelli and Mingolini-Guggenheim to use Indian textiles in their stylized reinterpretations of the sari. Their looking to India for inspiration attests to the acquired maturity of Italian fashion design only a few years after the Florentine catwalks of 1951 and 1952 to which the birth of Italian fashion is officially ascribed.Since Marucelli's and Mingolini-Guggenheim's groundbreaking gesture, Italian fashion designers’ engagement with the tradition of Indian dress has been uninterrupted to this day. Their interpretations of Indian clothing aesthetics have reflected, and at times even triggered, radical changes both in lifestyles and modes of production and consumption. Seen from today's distance the whole process, from its first imitative phase to Versace's sweeping restyling of the sari, has been marked by in-depth critical confrontation and progressive blurring of the boundaries.