Vitale Barberis Canonico

The winter of 1888 in Paris would be… wintry, but not gloomy. There is a Claude Frères volume in the Historical Archive of the Vitale Barberis Canonico wool mill, which contains rather warm, coloured cuts of anglais fabrics. Men’s jackets in diagonals, overchecks, dots, stripes, herringbones, all in the name of hiver to be worn with distinct cheerfulness and formal self-irony. Paris watches the Eiffel Tower growing slowly, but steadily. Expo 1889 would have its metal totem and the Ville Lumière would be more luminous than ever. It wouldn’t be possible not to experience that extraordinary season. And to be in fashion, in the English style, the elegant gentleman would be wearing soft, earthy worsteds in natural colours but with hints of red, accents of blue, apostrophes of green.

During that winter, which seemed more like a long autumn that had no intention of ever ending, the Parisian booksellers had a novelty on show to recommend to their loyal customers. Certainly, it was not a booklet for a couple of sous, neither was it a serialised novel to read in the newspaper. No, Messieurs, the work of Albert Charles Auguste Racinet is completely different. Since Monsieur Racinet had signed up with the celebrated editors Firmin Didot et C.ie in 1869, his works, already famous, had become even more admired and sought after. After L’Ornement polychrome (1869-1873), here was Le costume historique, the latest and unrivalled effort of the great engraver, illustrator, and most importantly, great lover of clothing and fashion from all periods. Le costume historique, published in handouts from 1876 on, was finished in 1888, it was made up of “cinq cents planches, trois cents en couleurs, or et argent, deux cents en camaïeu. Types principaux du vêtement et de la parure, rapprochés de ceux de l’intérieur de l’habitation dans tous les temps et chez tous les peuples, avec de nombreux détails sur le mobilier, les armes, les objets usuels, les moyens de transport”. Five hundred coloured plates, with gold and silver!

The spines of the six volumes of the original edition seem to be in perfect harmony with the cuts of fabrics animating the pages of the Claude Frères tome of that year. And even more so with those chromatic wonders which tell the story of the “fashion” of the remote period of the 8^th century, from the newly-discovered Oceania to the old Europe. It is no coincidence that they are to be found in the same prestigious archive. The mutual appeal of taste and style of objects belonging to the same epoch and the same place, a collection of fabrics and a collection of depictions of clothes and accessories from older or more recent periods, is very evocative. It is as if it were absolutely necessary to wear an English-style winter 1888 jacket to be able to fully enjoy the remarkable travail by Albert Racinet. The surroundings are right, in the Historical Archive of the Vitale Barberis Canonico wool mill. To read the interesting introduction by the editor himself and then the learned dissertation by the author who demonstrates a conspicuous technical vocabulary and explains the sumptuous planches.

Seeing the fabric samples alongside the brilliant work by Racinet creates a curious optical effect. The English-style fabrics, so rigorous in their design, as an expression of the epoch with its geometric confidence in society and progress, provide the figures of the “noble savages” from all over the world with even more vitality: citizens of classical Greek and Latin times, mediaeval dignitaries, elegant Amerindians, nobles from the Far East, burghers from the opulent Europe of the 17^th century, sophisticated aristocrats of the century of the Illumination, who all populate the pages of the six volumes. And all of these depictions of humanity clothed in the strangest of styles and from the most distant countries, seem to merge and sublimate to arrive at the point of those itchy worsteds, at those designs, as if the elegance of the fin du siècle were the destination of a path of repeated refinements, a development over millennia and over millions of miles, destined to be defined in a jacket to wear in Paris during that winter of 1888. Perhaps also in the snow, which many of the people as depicted by Monsieur Racinet had never even seen.

The creative and cultural strength of collections such as that of the Historical Archive of the Vitale Barberis Canonico wool mill is to be found in the possibility of establishing this type of correlation. Two ingenious, co-existing but distant products come together and generate opportunities and stimuli. And they tell the story of a vision of the world which is positive and oriented towards experimentation and discovery, towards the recovery of the past of clothing and how to understand it, towards the ideation of new creations and the commercial proposition of clothing and how to understand that. In this way, the Claude Frères classic of samples fuses with the ancient Le costume historique by Racinet and something completely new and modern can arise from such a fusion.

Between Rue d’Uzès and Rue Jacob, between the Claude Frères maison and the Didot libraire, runs the River Seine, there stands the Louvre, and the Palais-Royal (where a statue of Firmin Didot himself can be found) is silhouetted. Half an hour on foot. At Pratrivero the distance is even shorter, a flight of stairs, almost the same bookshelf.