The milliner who said no to Christian Dior and other useful female enterprises

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If the twentieth century was the century of the affirmation of Italian fashion, the common opinion, and a fair number of texts, tend to consider this process from its exact half or almost, 1951 , that is from the fashion shows in the Sala Bianca of which, moreover, there are important photographic testimonies also in the previous decade. But those who tend to be forgotten, as if they had been born in that precise moment or, in the case they had been active at the turn of the previous century, had never existed, are the women who worked to make this process happen. And who were more numerous, more active, more disenchanted than men. Rosa Genoni, to whom this year's "Donne e Moda" award has dedicated the category "forerunners of Made in Italy", cannot but be mentioned first: a political activist, professor at the Umanitaria, and the première of the Haardt&Fils tailoring shop in Milan, she had made her own, absorbing it already in her early years as a "piccinina", a debate on the need for an Italian fashion, freed from the Parisian one, which had taken root even before unification and in some ways had been active since the seventeenth century.

Her repertoire of models of a national fashion that started from popular costume and the great history of art, integrated into productions of artisanal excellence to which she herself contributed through women's associations, is a shining example of will and commitment of which many photographic images, many sketches and very few examples remain, some of those with which she had replaced the clothes lost in the devastating fire of the Italian pavilion at the Mostra delle Arti Decorative del Sempione, in August 1906, and today preserved at the Gallerie del Costume of Palazzo Pitti, in Florence saved from the fire of the Pavilion. Like many of the couturières who would succeed her, already in 1908 she had designed a dress that did not compress and modify the female body, the "tanagra" model, from the name of the famous Greek terracottas, immediately adopted by the diva of the moment, Lyda Borelli . Less than twenty years later, Luisa Spagnoli, now a popular heroine thanks to series, essays, fictionalized biographies such as the highly successful one by Paola Jacobbi, added a factory for processing angora wool to her candy and chocolate factory, eventually involving eight thousand breeders, and supporting one of the first corporate welfare initiatives, along the same lines that, one hundred and thirty years earlier, in 1789, which would prove fatal to her sister Maria Antonietta, had pushed Maria Carolina of Austria, wife of Ferdinand IV of Bourbon who undeservedly bears the signature on the document, to promulgate the Statute of San Leucio, an example of enlightened socialism around the highly esteemed raw silk factory: the first example in the world of equal pay and support for maternity.

And again, Maria Monaci Gallenga, the first Italian luxury entrepreneur to cross the Atlantic and the entire North American continent with her printed velvets as early as 1915, among the Italian artists present at the Art Deco exhibition in Paris in 1925, among the signatories of the program of the National Institute for Crafts and Small Industry, founded in the same year to promote the image of Italian products in the world. And then, and still dozens of other seamstresses who are linked to great artists and musicians, promoting their work, from Gigliola Curiel to Germana Marucelli, others who make their name not only in couture, but in pret-à-porter like the Fontana Sisters, and still lesser-known names, but making great strides today through their heirs, like Maria Peserico, a maximum cutter of trousers and creator of ingenious solutions for wearability, alongside Giannino Marzotto for decades and then, as an entrepreneur who dreamed of a woman in trousers already in 1962, when in women's magazines it was forbidden to wear anything other than a skirt, advisor and stylistic partner of geniuses of innovation in fashion like Adriano Goldschmied. Before Donatella Versace, before Miuccia Prada, Italian fashion was dotted with women. The important thing is to ensure that everyone is recognized in their rightful role.

I find myself writing about my city, Bologna, again, and in this case not about brands in crisis with a glorious past behind them, like Anna Masotti's La Perla, but about a milliner forgotten beyond the towers, Isotta Zerri. From the 1930s to the 1990s, in the shop overlooking Piazza Santo Stefano, this creative and talented artisan made hats for loyal customers (from Edda Ciano to Idina Ferruzzi), movie stars (Grace Kelly) and haute couture houses: first and foremost Coco Chanel and Christian Dior, who in 1952 would have wanted her at his side, in his atelier, in Paris but never managed to convince her to leave her home and family, where she dictated the law and made herself respected. Isotta's is a story that is both big and small at the same time, emblematic of how fashion in Italy is (has been?) a set of individual events marked by a lot of work, frequent sacrifices and attention to quality without which it would have been impossible to create a lasting and reliable "name".

Isotta Zerri, born in 1913 and died in 2001, learned to sew as a child with her mother and aunt, both seamstresses, a biographical fact common to many other women who created workshops and ateliers on which at least part of the structure of the future Made in Italy was consolidated. The habit of working early, even when it was not an economic necessity, was part of home learning, but it was not a given that the traditional family know-how would be refined to the point of reaching international fame: having become a milliner, “the lady of hats” quickly earned her love for the models “to look at, rest on the head and never touch again” and a design lucidity that is still enviable: “A hat must be born in one go, as soon as you put your hands on it . It must be light, vaporous, not weakened by changes or second thoughts, which I admit only in the mental design phase”. These are indicative principles of a designer's mentality, and they were collected in the documentary by Paolo Fiore Angelini, “Notes for a film on Isotta Zerri” , made following the exhibition dedicated to her on the centenary of her birth by Lavinia Turra, a stylist also from Bologna, daughter of family friends, who spent entire afternoons in her atelier during her childhood and there, she says, she learned to love fashion. From the memories of family members, clients and workers emerges a woman with a notable awareness of her own vision, so much so that she made Monsieur Dior notice how he was creating hats that were too stiff, “furnishing objects”, and how she could “do better”, and at the same time an entrepreneur with a practical sense and organizational skills in juggling deliveries for fashion houses and private clients to the point of developing a business with twenty employees. It is no coincidence, in fact, that a chapter in the collection of essays “Le donne che facendo l'impresa” (“Chapeau” by Marta Casarini - Edizioni del Loggione) was dedicated to her, because this is what it was about, as an economic activity and as an action that involved risks and a certain spirit of adventure, in addition to hard work.

The substrate of fashion is this: the ability to do and measure oneself with both manual skills and ideas, and in Bologna, as in other provincial cities and towns, many businesses were founded by women, or inspired by the women of the family. Just to name two, the furrier Gelosi Diva, which in the same years as Isotta Zerri (a few meters away) had organized its business through the control of the entire chain (tanning, leather trade, design and packaging); and Bovina, which, already a factory of flowers for hats in the thirties, from the sixties began to offer fabric flowers for brides and high fashion (today for Saint Laurent, Valentino and others) thanks to the talent of Raffaella Bonetti Bovina and her husband Raffaele. In fashion schools you happen to meet young designers and students attracted by the laboratory and artisanal dimension of fashion, by short supply chain projects rooted in their territory, convinced that it is not necessary to cross the threshold of super luxury brands to feel professionally fulfilled. A healthy way of thinking and acting, in some ways, beyond the myth of increasingly competitive and uncertain careers, as long as this does not turn into closure, into collections without design ambition.

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