Sensani

Gino Carlo (1888-1947). Italian costume designer, painter, and set designer who greatly influenced Italian fashion until after World War I. He was one of the most sought after costume designers in theater and was asked to collaborate with the biggest Italian directors of the period: Camerini (Il cappello a tre punte, Il signor Max), Blasetti (La corona di ferro, La cena delle beffe), Alessandrini (Cavalleria), and Poggioli (Addio giovinezza, Le sorelle Materassi), but also with French film directors like Chenal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, which Sensani handled in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec) and Christian Jacque (The Charterhouse of Parma, which was released posthumously in 1948). In Poggioli’s films, he also worked on the sets, claiming that they too were part of his responsibilities as costume designer. Working closely with the teaching director Luigi Chiarini, he taught at the Experimental Center for Cinematography creating many Italian costumes for the new recruits. The theatrical dressmaker Umberto Tirelli recounts, in his autobiography Vestire i sogni, “A travel companion for Soffici, Palazzeschi and De Pisis, Senzani did not stick to simply updating the costume tradition. He turned it upside down, by prising open its history and its precise reconstruction of cuts, materials, techniques, and linings. His renaissance was a true renaissance, with stays and iron corsets for women, justicoats and quartered shields for men. His interpretation of the 19th century did not draw on art deco and was not bastardised by influences and elements from the period in which Sensani was working. He was a great philologist of fashion.”