Milan retrospective celebrates visionary Italian designer Elio Fiorucci

Influential Italian art critic Gillo Dorfles once labelled Elio Fiorucci as “the Duchamp of Italian fashion.” To learn about the many different facets of the effervescent, offbeat Italian designer, his aficionados can now visit Milan’s Triennale design museum, which is dedicating a major exhibition to this popular fashion icon and ground-breaking, versatile designer, who died in 2015. The Fiorucci retrospective, the first of its kind, is open until March 16. It is an exciting, experiential exhibition, unveiling several hitherto unpublished documents about Elio Fiorucci himself, his personality and work.

The exhibition contains a wealth of pictures, drawings, videos, sound recordings, installations, gadgets, and of course clothes and accessories. The recordings notably include extracts from the 17-hour audio biography which Elio Fiorucci recorded aged 80. They can be listened to via the telephone handsets and old cassette recorders scattered around the exhibition, as though Fiorucci himself was privately recounting his life story to the exhibition’s visitors.

The organisers have been able to source material from other archives belonging to some of Fiorucci’s collaborators, and especially to his family and his label, which was acquired in 2022 by Swiss businesswoman Dona Bertarelli, via her family office. The documents allow visitors a glimpse of lesser-known instances of Fiorucci’s past, blending three separate threads: a more private, informal journey following the designer’s own voice, his business and cultural activities, and his fashion.

“It’s not an exhibition about fashion, but about ‘fashionology’, meaning all the ecosystems flourishing around the fashion industry that allowed Elio Fiorucci to have fun, improvise, and add to his work. Through a series of encounters and projects, he created an entirely new way of engaging with fashion,” said Judith Clark, the exhibition’s curator, speaking to FashionNetwork.com.

Elio Fiorucci was one of the fashion industry’s first rule-breakers, blending fashion, art and design and creating a non-hierarchical approach open to everyone. He was able to surround himself with some of the best creative minds of his times, especially from the 1970s and 80s: architects and designers like Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass and Andrea Branzi, graphic designer Italo Lupi, pop art giants like Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, who curated the décor of his iconic via Passerella store in Milan, as well as Jean Paul Gaultier and Madonna.

The exhibition is a treasure trove, with gems like the essay written by a 12-year-old Fiorucci, in which the young dreamer hailing from the small town of Piona, near Lake Como, imagined his future. He saw himself pursuing a retail career, describing the trade as a game, a hobby and a passion. The essay, set on a school desk in Fiorucci’s old classroom, opens the exhibition, described by Fabio Cherstich, who designed the setting, as a “kind of kaleidoscope full of all types of sensations.”

Another find is a letter written in 1979 by a group of Sicilian secondary school students, all “die-hard Fiorucci fans,” pleading with the designer to send them some of the “coolest [Fiorucci] stickers,” and “as many of them as possible.”

“For me, this document bears witness to Elio Fiorucci’s amazingly widespread success, much more so than a newspaper headline. It was marketing well ahead of its times. Stickers, gadgets, and pop stars playing in his stores: he was a pioneer of co-marketing,” said Clark.

The exhibition showcases for example a collection of garment labels, each in a different shape and format, like stamp-sized pictures. In 1973, Elio Fiorucci invented ‘fashion jeans’, making this classic workwear staple sexy and very wearable for women too. He was also one of the first to set up a fashion school in conjunction with his label.

In 1976, when Fiorucci opened his first store in Milan, introducing Italy to the uber-successful Swinging London style via an unprecedented range of clothes, accessories, gadgets, trinkets, drinks etc., he effectively invented the concept-store formula.

In 1976, he opened another revolutionary store in via Torino in Milan, featuring a space for live performances and a restaurant open until 2 a.m., the latter an absolute first in the city. The Triennale exhibition shows the whole design process for the restaurant, down to sketches for the menu. The same brightly coloured pop-art vibe was adopted for the cover graphics of the company’s 1976 financial report, decorated with the design of an aeroplane flying over a Mediterranean panorama with a glowing sky in the backdrop.

One of the exhibition’s most interesting finds is the section on ‘Fiorucci Dxing’, an experimental project focusing on image research, in which the designer’s staff studied anthropology, contemporary trends, and thinkers and philosophers like Theodor W. Adorno and Roland Barthes. “They also shot videos of what they saw during their worldwide travels. This research project was the label’s creative heart. Behind [Fiorucci’s] pop-art objects and graphics, there was depth, thinking, and a message,” concluded Cherstich.