(Hi)story / (Re)source / Project(ed). These three words resemble a manifesto. During Lineapelle 105, students from Designskolen in Kolding showed their work for the first time. The project, in collaboration with Lineapelle itself, combines traditional Italian craftsmanship with innovation in design from the Danish school. How? Through the contemporary and sustainable reinterpretation of some theatrical costumes from the Italian Baroque. We talked about it with Silvano Arnoldo and Brad Sisk, two of the experts who guided the work
by Domenico Casoria
When one tries to recreate the costumes of a play, the risk is always that the result will look like a badly made copy. In fact, this was not the aim of the project initiated by Designskolen.
The study of archives
The starting point was the study of archives. “This choice,” says Silvano Arnoldo, “stems from the need to bring students closer to a resource because, in this historical moment, the archive is a creative forge through which to formulate a new language of meanings. A sort of wunderkammer, or a room of wonders, in which the students of the various departments – fashion, textile, furniture, communication – immersed themselves to construct their own vision of the characters. These were inspired by those of the serious opera ‘Alessandro nell’Indie’ of 1726, written by Pietro Metastasio.
The course (which ran until 20 December) was held by three experts from the research group ‘WoVen’ (‘Women, Opera and the Public Stage in Eighteenth-Century Venice’). The design part of the course, from the concept to the realisation of the costumes, was supervised by Silvano Arnoldo. On the other hand, the theoretical content was handled by two WoVen researchers: Christine Jeanneret from the University of Copenhagen and Brad Carlton Sisk from NTNU (the Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
The Baroque opera
In addition to the archives, the project analysed all aspects of Baroque opera. “The music in the libretto archives, the scripts of the story, the sets, the costumes, everything was inspiring. We started from the assumption that historical research had to be the creative input,’ Sisk emphasises. The students at the Danish school did not simply recreate the costumes but started with a psychological portrait of the characters in the play and tried to capture their essence. “Almost all of them then created outerwear, starting with one of the most conspicuous elements of the time: the panier (crinoline) worn on the hip.
The students deconstructed it, reversing the position and wearing it at the top, on the shoulders or in the crown,” continues Sisk. Looking at the codes of the past, therefore, without stopping at the surface. For Alexander the Great, for example, the students highlighted the conqueror’s skills. Apparently, it was his mother, Olympias, who told him that his father was Zeus. And so, in the costume selected from the finalists, Alexander the Great takes on the guise of a warrior-child, with the clothes highlighting his mania for greatness.
The collaboration with Lineapelle
The interdisciplinary project, by the way, was born from the collaboration with Lineapelle, which supplied half of the leather used, which was re-imagined in corsets, structured dresses, and jewellery. Among other things, the fifty-six students who participated in the project were told about the outstanding craftsmanship and creative work behind each piece of leather. Archive, therefore, research, history and rethinking past eras through leather. To give life to a new way of designing.
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