Giovanni Battista Giorgini: Designing the Future

Abstract

This paper aims to highlight the history of Giovanni Battista Giorgini, “The Father of Italian Fashion”. Thanks to Giorgini, Italian Fashion becomes famous all over the world. Fashion journalist Elisa Vittoria Massai, one of the era’s most authoritative analysts of custom and economics and a guest at the 12 February 1951 Villa Torrigiani show, wrote: “By 1957, Italy was the leading European supplier of fabrics and clothing items to the U.S. Italy had surpassed both England and France. It is an absolute certainty that this would not have been possible had the Palazzo Pitti events, which were of incalculable promotional and advertising value, not been held with a seasonal cadence and had Giorgini’s professionalism as a commission agent and representative of the best-placed of the American stores not convinced competing agents and stores to jump in. The incredible success story, almost a fairy tale, of Italian fashion abroad comes clear in just a few numbers. Exports of wool and silk fabrics, for example, quintupled in six years; exports of knitwear products multiplied eightfold; knit outerwear alone about doubled. Womenswear sales jumped from a paltry 45 million lire in 1950 to one billion, 800 million in 1957. Leather footwear, from 208 million in 1950 to almost nineteen billion in 1957. Even Italian buttons rose in importance, with their two billion and change of 1957 over a value approaching zero in 1950.