Fortuny
Mariano Fortuny (1871-1949) was a fabric and clothing designer. Fortuny’s name is forever linked to the famous pleated fabric he invented and patented in 1909, the forerunner of the new permanent pleating techniques used by designers such as Issey Miyake. Fortuny was the original embodiment of the fashion designer as artist, a painter himself and born into a family of artists (his father, Mariano y Marsal was a celebrated Spanish painter). He was born in Granada, Spain, and lived for a while in Paris, but in 1889 he moved to Venice, where he developed his multiple interests as a painter, photographer and designer of flamboyantly creative sets for the theater and the opera. Early on he began creating his own fabrics, painting them and exploring techniques of diffused light. In his art and his designs he was inspired by Venetian art of the 15th and 16th centuries and Arabic cultures. His first steps in fashion were through the designs he created for the theater, beginning with a simple scarf, the Knossos scarf, which was printed with geometric patterns inspired by Cycladic art. In time he developed a dress to go with the scarf, a pleated silk cylinder that could be belted around the waist called the Delphi dress. All his dresses and original fabrics were made by hand in his studio. In Fortuny’s lifetime, he dressed some of the world’s most flamboyant personalities, who donned his clothes both in life and on the stage: Isabella Duncan, Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Peggy Guggenheim, and Emma and Irma Gramatica. Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past, dressed Mme. de Guermantes in “garments made by Fortuny,” and wrote, “is it their historical character, or is it rather that each one of them is unique, that gives them so special a significance?” The Fortuny Museum at Palazzo Orfei, in Venice, houses a number of his works, clothes and furniture, and fashion museums throughout the world collect his designs.