D’Annunzio

Gabriele (1863-1938). Poet, writer, and dramatist. He was one of the most elegant men of Italy, a sort of national Beau Brummel. This was discovered in 1988, when suits, coats, ties, waistcoats, pajamas, nightgowns, spats, underwear, riding outfits, raincoats, hats, handkerchiefs, gloves, starched collars, white piqué scarves to be worn around the neck, a bear skin fur, and suspenders were all taken from the closet of his last home for the exhibit D’Annunzio’s Wardrobe, organized for Pitti Uomo by Annamaria Andreoli, president of the Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani. This wardrobe is the most complete document concerning men’s fashion in Italy from the late 1800s to the first decades of the 1900s. The labels on those garments represent the very best of those years as to tailoring workshops (De Nicola and Petroni in Naples, Prandoni in Milan); shirt makers (Bonaldi in Venice, Dalmasso in Florence); shoemakers (Quinté in Milan, Montelatici & Volpi in Florence); and boutiques (Pozzi in Milan, Salvatore Morziello in Naples). When, in 1895, he embarked on the yacht Fantasia, owned by Edoardo Scarfoglio, the director of Il Mattino of Naples, for a cruise to Greece, D’Annunzio neatly listed what he was to take on board: “Iron grey suit, black-and-white check suit, brown suit with tait, light brown shirt, three white flannel suits, black tait, light pants, smoking jacket, six white waistcoats.” He would say about himself: “I am an animal of luxury.” And because of his voracity for luxury he would pile up such a quantity of debt that he was forced to leave Italy in flight from creditors. But his taste and his eye for fashion helped him in his job as a reporter when, in Rome as a young man, he earned his living as a journalist, signing his pieces as Duca Minimo: “Nothing is more voluptuous, in a refined way, than an otter fur that has already been used for a certain period of time.” His novel Pleasure is full of fashion details. If he had to buy a gift for a woman, he would ask the dressmaker Marta Palmer (it was the late 1920s) to put a label that read Gabriel Nuntius Vestiarius Fecit on the dress or cloak. And he was very precise in his requests: “I’d like a large cloak for a very tall lady. I’d like it black, loose, light, with a big bunch of red roses (a very intense color), secretly embroidered on the reverse side….The roses must be tied with a gold ribbon and a big flourish. Something rich, violent, and done secretly.” When, in the mid 1930s, the dressmaker Biki offered him some blouses for the pianist Luisa Baccara, his last partner, he wrote her: “Admiring not in a lifeless shop window but in vital movement the folds, the gaps, the solid fabric and the airy lace, the seams and hems, they have appeared to me as elements of a precise rhythm and a vague unknown, and thus, of poetry.”