Poetic Embroidery

 

Dedicated to my blogger friend Kate Davies: http://fabrickated.com/

 

 

The detail was breathtaking: lace embroidered with phrases from Jacques Prevert‘s This Love in Luneville stitch like calligram poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, the embellished bust of a corset with Latin phrases taken from eclogues by Virgil,  and gold lamé representing DanteAlighieri‘s Divine Comedy, which required 1700 hours of work. For the Valentino haute couture Spring/Summer 2015 collection, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli wanted to enhance and embellish love itself; translating the strongest of human sentiments into a language of dresses. Through embroidery, lamé, ciphers, verses, motifs, the design duo recreated the words of the great poets and writers, from Dante to Prévert through to Pasolini and Virgil. The couture masterpieces required up to two months of work and 2,500 hours of embroidery by the house’s master craftsmen to create the works of art presented at the Hotel Salomon de Rothschild, to the sound of Moments in Love from Art of Noise

 
 

“Tutto il mio folle amore, lo soffia il ciela”. White tulle cloud dress, hand-painted in grey and embroidered with vermeil colored lame.
Inspired by the song Che cosa sono le nuvole?, lyrics by Pier Paolo Pasolini and composed by Domenico Mondugno.
2.500 hours of embroidery

 
 

“Cet Amour, c’est le tien, c’est le mien”. White silver tulle cloud dress embroidered with Chantilly and jet calligrams.
Lace overlay of the Jacques Prevert poem Cet Amour from 1945, picked out in luneville embroidery, in the spirit of a Calligram by Guillaume Appolinaire in 1918.
2,000 hours of embroidery

 
 

Canzone dell”Amore perduto powder-coloured tulle cloud dress, embroidered with wilted flowers. Overlay of wilted flower petals of painted chiffon, inspired by the lyrics from Canzone dell’Amore perduto by Fabrizio De Andrè (1974)

 
 

Amor Vincit Omnia, embroidered garnet linen corset, with dusty tulle skirts.
Corset embroidered with a Latin phrase from Virgil’s Les Bucoliques (Eclogues):

“Omnia vincit Amor; et nos cedamus Amori.” (Love conquers all and we must yield to Love.)
Book X, line 69 (Dryden).

 

I Sit and Look Out

Pasolini, Duane Michals,  1969

 
 

83

“I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.”

Walt Whitman