Roberto Capucci's sculpture-dresses on display at the Fondazione Banco di Napoli

Kicking off at the Fondazione Banco di Napoli headquarters on Via dei Tribunali in the heart of Campania’s capital city, from October 2 to November 26, 2021, is the exhibition Pages of Silk by Roberto Capucci, one of the fathers of great Italian fashion. The exhibition is housed in the rooms of the museum of the Historical Archives of the Fondazione Banco di Napoli “Il Cartastorie”: the protagonists are the dress-sculptures of Roberto Capucci, displayed in an exhibition curated by Rossella Paliotto, president of the Fondazione Banco di Napoli, and Enrico Minio Capucci, director of the Roberto Capucci Foundation: twenty-one in all of Capucci’s works from the Foundation of the same name at Villa Manin in the province of Udine, displayed among the documents housed in the Banco di Napoli Historical Archives museum.

The exhibition also offered an opportunity to add a few fragments of the past that emerged from the archival papers, many of them kept at the Foundation, to rethink the precious fiber chosen by the Roman master for his sculpture-works, an undisputed protagonist in Italian and Neapolitan sartorial history in the modern age: silk. As a tribute to Roberto Capucci and the chromatics of his sought-after compositions, a special prominence is given to the colors, imbued with shades of meaning, which seem to breathe life back into the unpublished documents, further evidence of the past of Naples, a center of excellence for silk production and processing.

Multiple interweavings form the basis of the idea of the exhibition: Naples and Friuli, centers of silk production; Roberto Capucci’s works of art, the foundation of Made in Italy since 1952, the year of the first fashion show in the White Room of Palazzo Pitti; and the documented ancient silk and craft activities related to the Neapolitan clothing industry. So much material and so many small and big stories in the volume edited by Bianca Stranieri.

Supporting the idea is the photographic documentation-interpretation by Fabio Donato, for artistic work to deepen the possible relationships between clothes and the extraordinary testimony of the history of the Mezzogiorno, an immersive experience between folders and multimedia where clothes and mannequins converse with content and news of the economic, social and artistic history of the southern regions and trade contracts with various European nations.

“Hosting the works of master Roberto Capucci, directly in the halls of the archives, as revealed in these pages by the skillful lens of another master, the artist photographer Fabio Donato,” says Fondazione Banco di Napoli President Rossella Paliotto, “is intended to be not only a plastic manifestation of Fondazione Banco di Napoli’s attention to Italian excellence, appreciated and recognized internationally, but also unequivocal proof of the communicative power of its historical archive.”

Roberto Capucci's sculpture-dresses on display at the Fondazione Banco di Napoli

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