Label Type
Mystery MondayLabel
Hello everyone – we hope you enjoyed your spring break and are ready for another round of Mystery Monday. Be sure to swing by Pao Hall and see the newly installed costumes in the two front cases. Recently acquired following an exhibition of this designer’s work in the Rueff Galleries, do you know this designer’s name?
The answer is Sonia Biacchi (1930-2019). Biacchi was an Italian costumier known for her amazing Bauhaus inspired designs. Raised in an artistic household, she had been drawn to performance but felt that she did not have the talents to pursue an acting career so instead turned to costume design. Biacchi, who was self-taught, claimed that she had poor taste in art at first in a 2009 interview with Dazed, but eventually learned through experimenting and trial and error. Biacchi worked as the artistic director of the Centro Teatrale di Ricerca dance studio in a converted 13th century convent on the Venetian island of Giudecca and produced the costumes for their experimental dance performances.
Biacchi’s artistic inspiration came from the Bauhaus German painter Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), who designed and produced costumes and worked as a choreographer for the Weimar Bauhaus through the 1920s. His most well-known experimental dance performance was Triadisches Ballett, debuted in 1922, where dancers assumed geometric forms over three acts through the use of gesture and costume. You can see this association in Biacchi’s garments now in Purdue’s collection.
Biacchi often incorporated unusual materials to create architectural forms in her costumes. One of the pieces installed in Pao Hall is made from the synthetic fabric used to make ship sails reinforced with artificial plastic boning, usually used for corsetry. She stated, "My tri-dimensional plastic structures that wrap up dancers' bodies limit their movements and change their bodies. The movement must be related to the form of the structures producing mechanising and robot-like effects." She wanted to play with the performer’s shape, volume, and silhouette during dance. The restrictions and architecture of the costumes ensures that the performer must work with the structure, allowing the costumes to become a secondary actor on the stage. She claimed her best works have presence but also flexibility.
To see our costumes performed, here are two YouTube links from Centro Teatrale di Ricerca’s channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5mIi0alvrE) and (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aTM9BX9Rqw).
While most of Biacchi’s costumes were produced for dance, her designs also caught the eye of fashion designers. Pierre Cardin (1922-2020), the French couturier, bought two of her works and they are now in his eponymous museum. Following their display, Biacchi’s family kindly gifted us with several of the works so we will be able to rotate them on display.
See you all next week.
Artist: Sonia Biacchi (1930-2019), Italian
Title: Frattale
Date: ca. 1995
Medium: Synthetic fiber and plastic boning
Technique: Sewing
Credit line: Gift of the heirs of Sonia Biacchi and purchased through the Lonsford Fund