Manuela Pavesi

“I’ve always loved fashion and I’ve always been immersed in it. My mother was a very strict and religious woman. She was very beautiful and elegant but at the same time a real wild one. She did not care about the house. She was an independent spirit, incapable of compromise, with only one weakness: fashion. (...) I remember afternoons spent with her in the tailor’s shop in Mantua. I recall a mannequin in a gray suit from one of the earliest Yves Saint Laurent collections, with a foulard with the YSL initials. Mantua was a very elegant city.” This is how Manuela Pavesi spoke of the origins of her great passion for fashion during one of our meetings, quasi-clandestine, at her beautiful home in Mantua. To think about – before her untimely passing in 2015 – that exhibit about her and made with her that should have used her private collection to stage a phantasmagoric and immense fantasy. Her words gave me access to the unconscious that not only shaped her work but also influenced the creations of some of her contemporaries like Marc Jacobs. In her there was a radical imagination that did not seek consensus but that often wanted to disturb and unsettle. She was a fashion coordinator at Prada. Miuccia and Manuela had met when the latter was an editor at Vogue Italia. It was the seventies. Manuela entered the original Prada store in the Galleria and was welcomed by Miuccia dressed in the same Saint Laurent outfit. A friendship was born that turned into a very strong partnership. Manuela told me that at one point they went to a famous children’s store in Milan and had made identical baby coats. Maybe it’s not true but it seems likely. Manuela Pavesi was one of the protagonists of international fashion and of visual culture. She was eclectic and multifaceted. It wasn’t enough to describe her as a fashion editor, collector, photographer and fashion coordinator. Born in 1949, after her liberal arts studies she joined Vogue Italia in 1972. She was fashion editor alongside photographers such as Gian Paolo Barbieri, David Bailey, Peter Lindbergh and Albert Watson – with the latter she published in 1988 the book “Prada a Milano: Fotografata da Albert Watson” on the occasion of the launch of the ready-to-wear line designed by Miuccia Prada. She had a close association with Helmut Newton, which resulted in two celebrated photo shoots published in the December editions of Vogue Italia in 1981 and 1982. The first, “All black or nothing,” was set in a 1930s villa in Brescia: the model is duplicated across the double page spread, first naked and then dressed. The second shoot, “The poor girl and the rich girl: two stars,” was a highly sophisticated dialogue between two of the most important models from that time: Arielle Burgelin and Simonetta Gianfelici. In 1992, Pavesi decided to leave Vogue Italia and began a freelance photography career. Since the seventies, her collection of clothes has been assembled based on the sensibilities of a fashion editor as if it were a sequence or a combinatorial game of themes: both 20th century and contemporary western fashion along with ethnic looks seen through a global lens. Manuela used fashion as an instrument of knowledge. The childhood memory became the driving force behind a story that walked a fine line and branched out. Fashion, the clothing, was everything. She did not care that a dress looked good and met certain needs, it interested her the idea that had defined it. She valued the poetics of anti-elegance: her style was based not on a scenographic and inert vision but rather on the search for a dissonant note. An outfit and her concept of dressing up did not rely on the body but on an idea as a perfect abstraction. Her collection was an essay on the creative processes of fashion and the archives as places of research because fashion, by its nature, moves through unexpected jumps and links between different materials. It’s a collage of materials that can’t be approached chronologically; it shares formal and structural similarities. Pavesi acted like a curator. In her collection, which defined concept maps and traced patterns, uniforms played a key role. Pavesi sensed their power, their charm, their rigid language that was straightforward. In the uniforms she recognized a sense of moderation, and for her it was perfect for expressing a certain aesthetic: an essential attitude that became a way of life. ( • original text page 260