Tirelli

Umberto Tirelli (1928-1992). Costume maker and designer, historian of costume, collector. The son of a merchant who sold wine and grains, he was born in Gualtieri, a town in Emilia near river Po. He discovered that he had a love of clothing by frequenting the moe of Luigi Bigi, a tailor and the ambassador of French fashion in Milan in the 1930s and a fellow townsman. In 1952, Giorgio Sarassi who, with Bigi’s help, had made his fortune in the business of fabrics for high fashion, found Tirelli a job in Milan: a delivery boy and display designer for Marco, a fabric shop in the Via Montenapoleone. Almost directly across the street was the boutique of Mirsa where Beppe Modenese worked with Paola Carola. In order to save money, in order “to survive because our pay was minimal,” Tirelli recalled in his autobiography, Vestire i sogni (written with Guido Vergani for the Feltrinelli publishing house), they decided to rent a place together. In 1953, he met Pia Rame and Carlo Mezzadri who had just purchased the theatrical costume maker Finzi. They offered him a chance to try out. It was the beginning of a spectacular career: the costumes for Lila De Nobili in Come le foglie; some of the costumes, also for De Nobili, for the legendary La Traviata staged at La Scala in 1955, directed by Luchino Visconti; the move to Rome to work in the Sartoria Safas for the sisters Emma and Gita Maggioni; the costumes for The Leopard; and he set up in business for himself in 1964. From that time on, Tirelli was on a tireless quest for impossible materials, an inventor of solutions. From then on, he became much more than simply a costume maker. He was a profound scholar of fashion over the centuries, he was the ally, the supporter of costume makers in the design phase as well, and not merely in the process of bringing a costume to fruition from the cocoon of a sketch. He worked with the biggest names of theater costumes in the second half of the twentieth century, from De Nobili, Piero Tosi, Pierluigi Pizzi, Luciano Damiani, and Danilo Donati to Gabriella Pescucci, Vera Marzot, Gitt Magrini, Ezio Frigerio, Milena Canonero, Marcel Escoffier, and Maurizio Monteverde. His contribution was essential to them in terms of culture, philology of fashion, the recovery of age-old techniques, the quest for authentic outfits (he had a Collection of 20,000 items, dating from the seventeenth century to the days of Chanel and Dior) in almost archaeological excavations in attics, lofts, abandoned armoires, among the rags of the flea markets. In 1986, Tirelli donated 100 authentic outfits and 100 theatrical costumes to the Galleria del Costume of Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Since his death, his sartoria has been run by Dino Trappetti, Gabriella Pescucci and Giorgio D’Alberti.