Palazzi

Carlo. Men’s fashion designer and entrepreneur from the 1960s to the 1980s. His success began in 1965, with his first shop and fashion-house in Via Borgogna in Rome. Three years later he had a shop on Fifth Avenue and in a short space of time in Japan (7 show rooms in Tokyo and Osaka), Canada, London (2 shops), and Palm Beach. Born in Urbino, he started off as an junior high schoolteacher, then moved to Rome after the war where he did a bit of everything to get by: searching for and identifying Americans fallen on the Italian battlefield, hotel barman, for 13 years shop assistant and then manager of a city-center shirt shop where he learned the trade that enabled him to set up on his own. In her book Mass-Moda/Fatti e personaggi dell’italian look (Mass-Fashion/Makers and events of the Italian look, published by Spinelli, 1979) Adriana Mulassano recounted: “He caught the right current straightaway: in men’s fashion it was the time of revolt against gray and black. He saw some samples of embroidered silk shirts in Milan (even now in Brazil they call them ‘Palizzis’), bought them up and sold them in a frenzy, meanwhile he changed the face of the tie, widening it from six to nine centimeters, using novel, gaily-colored floral fabrics (…) He invented the ‘guru’ shirt, with a high collar and a zip up the back. In 1970 at the Palazzo Braschi haute-couture show he presented shirts, jackets, and pants all made from the same tweed fabric (…). In 1971, he created another very successful piece for the “nonconformist evening”: a velvet jacket over very sporty herringbone tweed pants and waistcoat.”