AN APPRECIATION : Emilio Pucci Meant Prints and Privilege in the ‘60s
In the ‘60s, there was bouffant hair, frosted lipstick and jeweled harem sandals. There was the jet set, the “The Girl From Ipanema,” and “The Look of Love.” There was Marilyn, Liz and Jackie.
And there was Emilio Pucci.
The name meant prints and privilege. Born into a family of Florentine aristocrats, his full title was Emilio Pucci Marchese di Barsento. His heritage gave a royal taste to the Popsicle-color patterns he put on silk jersey dresses and sold to the most envied women of his day. Long before his death in Florence on Sunday, his contribution to fashion was already legend.
Other people used love beads and bare feet for their personal ‘60s style. Pucci and his princesses used his swirling, stream-of-consciousness prints. The images defied logic, and the clothes they decorated defied something just as basic.
Underwear.
Pucci liked sleek, Space Age fashion inspired by a ski suit he once made for himself. But when he translated the idea to women’s wear, it didn’t mesh with the leading trend in lingerie. Torpedo bras and torture chamber girdles, which women were accustomed to wearing when Pucci hit his stride in the early ‘60s, were the enemies of those stretchy shifts, tunic tops and A-line palazzo pants. His clothes were meant to glide over smooth surfaces. Anything else would ruin the effect, like lumps in mashed potatoes.
Marilyn Monroe may have been one of the first to appreciate that. She walked into a store in Beverly Hills to try on the Pucci in the window. When she left she was wearing the dress, but not her underwear. This story, told by author Shirley Kennedy in “Pucci, A Renaissance in Fashion,” suggests the coterie that formed around him.
As much as the look, the name set his label apart. To wear a Pucci was to be a Pucci, or the loose equivalent. Marisa Berenson posed with Pucci purses for Vogue in 1965. Liz Taylor hurried through the Rome airport in a Pucci dress and purse in 1967. Jackie Onassis toured Mt. Olympus in a Pucci sleeveless shift in 1969.
A legion of imitators followed. American women had access to Pucci knockoffs within months of the originals. They were copied in the ‘60s and again, in the early ‘90s when Pucci had a brief revival.
Kennedy writes that his travels inspired his prints. Nearly indecipherable at first, the designs slowly unscramble to suggest Russian church domes, French country flowers, or Balinese batiks.
He transferred them to fabrics he helped develop in Italian textile mills. He wanted lighter-weight, finer-gauge silks, cashmeres and cottons than what was typical. In 1960 he introduced a signature fabric, “Emilioform,” an elasticized silk Shantung he used for bodysuits and evening wear.
Aware of his own star quality, he signed “Emilio,” to almost everything he made. Small, handwritten, discreet, informal, that signature was potent just the same. Eventually it appeared on pillows, pens and a Lincoln Continental.
A Golden Age of franchise fashion flowered. By the ‘70s, all sorts of designers were signing deals, living like royalty, acting like movie stars, putting their name on cars, coverlets and chocolates.
But Pucci was the genuine article.
