Moda Italiana en la era de la "Putica"

Fashion Diary Italian Fashion in the Time of the Trollop By GUY TREBAY Published: February 22, 2007 Milan

Photographs by Alberto Pellaschiar/Associated Press (far left), Antonio Calanni/Associated Press (second and third from left) and Franco Origlia/Getty Images (second from right) ADD TO CART Jil Sander cashmere top and beaded tweed skirt. SLEEP ON IT Prada's gray flannels and shag wool sweater. TO THE TRADE ONLY Big-cat spots, sashed at the neck, ruffled at the knee, by D & G. SCREEN YOUR CALLS Lapo Elkann, redeemed only by granddad's suits. WEAR GLOVES Rocco Siffredi, porn star and potato-chip pusher.

IN Italy nobody drives in the slow lane, colloquially called the lane of shame. So it's somewhat of a mystery why the Italian fashion industry, one of the primary engines of the Italian economy, continues to putter along year after year doing 50 while China, Eastern Europe, India and — aesthetically if not economically — even France go whizzing past. In terms of volume of production, Italy remains a force, one illustration of this being the sheer scope of the seasonal fashion weeks here. No fewer than 228 runway shows are noted in Milan's official seven-day calendar; a free fashion handout thicker than a "Bleak House" paperback lists 61 solidly packed pages of showrooms that are open to buyers and the press. Yet to be honest, there are no more than a handful of shows that anyone cares about or that the ever-expanding posse of international press and buyers has come to Milan eager to see. At this point there is Bottega Veneta. There is Jil Sander. There is Prada. There is Gucci. (Maybe also Marni.) Two of these are designed by Italians (the others are designed by a German and a Belgian, respectively), and at this point Miuccia Prada is as ambivalent about national identity as one can be and still qualify for a passport. Beginning last year, Ms. Prada made even clearer the shakiness of her allegiance to what's termed the Italian fashion system when she packed up her Miu Miu show and started staging it in Paris.

Alessandro Garofalo/Reuters WEAR IT WHERE? Maybe to take the dog to the veterinarian. From D & G.

What happened? Designers like Armani, whose brands are now global behemoths, once also dominated the aesthetic side of the fashion business. Why does Italy seem like it was run off the road? "Italy has a big, big problem, which is that there is no generational change," said Ennio Capasa, the designer of Costume National, a respected but largely commercial label that is, in typical eccentric fashion, commemorating its 21st anniversary this year. "Designwise, factorywise, in terms of the bureaucracy, we're behind." It is not just, as many suggest, that Italy, long renowned for its textiles, its handcrafts and its high aesthetic standards, has lost large hunks of its manufacturing market to Eastern Europe, China and India. Plenty of people here will tell you that the China experiment has not necessarily worked out. Cheap foreign copies of Italian luxury goods are fine, but not fine enough, apparently, to satisfy the trained eyes and high expectations of people spoiled by the access they've always had to the best artisans around, workers whose skills have been transmitted across centuries. You don't hear the word used explicitly, but the quality missing from fashion here now is what Italians refer to as raffinatezza, or refinement. This is not a small detail in a country historically defined almost entirely by its visual culture. What has replaced it in part is the tackiness and vulgarity of which America once claimed the dominant market share. American pop culture at this point is largely vapid and formless. What is Paris Hilton but a cloud of pastel ectoplasm, its molecules barely sticky enough to hold form?

Alberto Pellaschiar/Associated Press JILL SANDER

Italian pop culture produces its own manifestations, one being the careers of the designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, whose status as media deities owes less to their design skills than to their genius for tapping into a youth culture just as dumb as its American counterpart but visually definable in terms of hardness, or what's called here durezza. Let other designers make clothes that look chic or classy. Dolce & Gabbana seems satisfied to have built a nearly $1 billion privately owned company on the sartorial wisdom of the ragazzi, the street kids, dressing a generation that, as is often reported, reads perhaps a book a year and watches more television daily (240 minutes on average) than almost any other similar population in Europe.

Alberto Pellaschiar/Associated Press GIORGIO ARMANI A fur wrap over a nipped-waist ottoman jacket and a draped skirt.

It was the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini who first pronounced doom on Italy's aesthetic and moral standards based on the decadence he saw emanating from the boob tube. But that was eons before the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi created his mediagarchy, before Domenico and Stefano became television regulars, before the country's biggest porn star, Rocco Siffredi, became a snack foods huckster featured in commercials for Amica potato chips whose tag line uses a double entrendre that is slang for a part of the female anatomy. Like most eggheads of the period, Pasolini decried the vulgarization of culture by the ubiquitous new medium. Yet in Pasolini's day, Italy could still be said to have a vital literary, artistic and cinematic scene to counter the television's evil rays. Even the applied forms like fashion then embodied an image of Italy as a holdout of refined tradition and Italians as the guardians and arbiters of patrician ways. That this fantasy has not altogether faded can be seen in the press obsession with Lapo Elkann, reprobate grandson of Gianni Agnelli, the former Fiat chief. Despite repeated drug binges, stints in rehab, his overdose in the apartment of a middle-aged transvestite, Mr. Elkann is invariably seen as a paragon of elegance. Mostly this is because he wears his grandfather's clothes. There is a particularly Italian message in the fact that, no matter what kind of antics Mr. Elkann gets up to, his inherited hand-me-downs possess the magical power to restore him to moral rectitude.

Alberto Pellaschiar/Associated Press BURBERRY A quilted leather jacket with a wide collar, zips and buckles.

It's this raffinatezza that seems to have gone, either leaving the country or ignored by designers whose idea of fashion is a leopard-print frock for a trollop-slash-starlet or the 99th iteration of whiskered jeans. "I'm not sure it will ever come back," Mr. Capasa of Costume National said, referring to the refinement of Italian fashion and the sense of Italy as a generator of style and innovative ideas. "At the top level of power, there are just a few brands left," and, he added, very little space left for either traditional labels or new blood. "They have to embrace the future," Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, said at the Armani show on Monday, referring to the Camera Nazionale, the trade group that regulates the Italian fashion industry. Slow to promote novelty or young designers, the group has been accused of being old-fashioned, resistant, entrenched. "There are wonderful, talented people here, but it's always the same names," Ms. Wintour said. "Where is the support? Where is the sponsorship? You have to embrace the future of fashion and look for the next generation." And if that doesn't happen, it is no stretch to imagine a day when the fast-lane folks who run global fashion will decide to skip the Milan exit in their haste to find the next great place.

Antonio Calanni/Associated Press PRADA A boiled-wool cap.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007

Obras de arte recuperadas van a remate.

Recovered Artworks Heading to Auction By CAROL VOGEL Published: February 22, 2007

A year ago the settlement was hailed as one of the largest restitutions of art seized by the Nazis. Now about 170 old master paintings returned to the heirs of Jacques Goudstikker, a prominent Dutch dealer who fled Amsterdam in 1940, are to be offered at Christie's in three sales, beginning in April in New York. The auction house says the paintings, many on view in Dutch museums and government buildings since the 1950s, could fetch from $22 million to $35 million. "It was a hard decision," said Marei von Saher, the widow of Edward, the only son of Desirée and Jacques Goudstikker. "I was in Holland a few days ago and saw the paintings for the first time. Some hit my heart right away. It was overwhelming." Christie's On the block: Salomon van Ruysdael's "Ferry Boat With Cattle on the River Vecht Near Nijenrode," estimated at $3 million to $5 million. Among the stars in the April sale are "Ferry Boat With Cattle on the River Vecht Near Nijenrode," a Salomon van Ruysdael landscape with a luminous blue sky, estimated at $3 million to $5 million. A work by the great Haarlem portrait painter Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck is expected to fetch $700,000 to $1 million. While the heirs — Mrs. von Saher of Greenwich, Conn., and her two daughters, Charlène and Chantal — finalize exactly how many paintings Christie's will auction, they are also working with Peter C. Sutton, an expert on Dutch old master paintings and the director of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, to organize an international traveling exhibition. Which museums will take the show has yet to be determined, but it will include paintings that the family is not, for now at least, selling — including works by Jan Steen, van Ruysdael and Jan van der Heyden. "We are hoping this show will symbolize his connoisseurship as a dealer," Mrs. von Saher said of her father-in-law. "People have forgotten him. We want the public to recognize his legacy." Even more important, her daughter Charlène said, the traveling exhibition would tell the world "about a historical injustice put right." Christie's "Portrait of Jean La Gouche" by Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck could bring in $700,000 to $1 million. The story of Jacques Goudstikker — and his heirs' eight-year legal battle to wrest some of his paintings from the Dutch government — is a complex tale of scholarship and tenacity. Mr. Goudstikker, his wife and their son fled the Netherlands on May 14, 1940, as Amsterdam was invaded by the Nazis, leaving behind his gallery business and some 1,400 artworks. A second-generation art dealer, Mr. Goudstikker was unable to take any of his prized paintings with him, but he did carry a small black notebook containing meticulous records of more than 1,000 works in his inventory. That notebook, which his wife retrieved after he died in a fall on the blacked-out freighter carrying them to safety, became crucial decades later when his widow and son began searching for the collection. At one point many of the best works were owned by Hermann Göring. After the war, nearly 300 paintings from the Goudstikker collection were returned by the Allies to the Dutch and, despite the family's protests, placed in the national collections. But in February 2006 the Dutch government agreed to return 202 paintings it had recovered after the war. Hundreds of works are still missing. "We have researchers working round the clock," said Lawrence M. Kaye of the New York law firm Herrick, Feinstein, who represents Mrs. von Saher and her daughters. "So far we recovered over 30 works, including a Degas drawing." News of the three auctions comes just a week after a Dutch court granted Mrs. von Saher permission to ship the 202 paintings from the Netherlands to the United States. Roelof van Holthe tot Echten, a lawyer, had asked the courts to block the release of the art until he was paid the fee he claims for helping to recover the art. The judge, however, ordered Mrs. von Saher to put down a $10.4 million bank guarantee as a security deposit until the lawyer's fee is settled by the court. Asked if Christie's was advancing her the $10.4 million, Mr. Kaye replied: "Clearly she's getting the money from somewhere. I can't discuss her financial arrangement with Christie's." Christie's Jacques Goudstikker Mr. Goudstikker, who was 42 when he died, had produced shows with lavishly illustrated catalogs of art by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Goya, Rubens and Hieronymus Bosch. "He was a very international dealer who sort of styled himself as the Dutch Duveen," said Nicholas Hall, an international director of Christie's old master paintings department, referring to the renowned art dealer Joseph Duveen, from the early 20th century. "He had sophisticated and wide-ranging taste and dealt in everything from early Italian paintings to 17th- and 18th-century French and Italian works." Mr. Goudstikker placed paintings in museums throughout Europe, Mr. Hall added, and also sold to institutions and collectors in the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Samuel H. Kress, the department store owner who was an early donor to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It was Mr. Hall who helped the family decide which paintings to auction at Christie's. There are many works by the same artists — six by van Ruysdael, four by Jan van Goyen, six by David Teniers the Younger — so to avoid saturating the market, Christie's recommended three separate sales. The first is April 19 in New York; the next, July 5 in London; and the third, in November in Amsterdam. "There are paintings that have great historical significance that would resonate better in Europe," Mr. Hall said. A five-panel altarpiece from the 1520s, "The Last Supper," by the Dutch painter Jacob Oostsanen, will go to auction in London because early Dutch painting is more appreciated in Europe, he said. Other works, especially less religious subjects like landscapes, still lifes and portraits, appeal more to American taste. "Wooded Landscape With a Cottage" by the 17th-century Dutch painter Philips Koninck is one of the stars in the April sale. "There have only been two works by Koninck to come to auction in the last 20 years," Mr. Hall said, noting its estimate of $1.5 million to $2 million. Christie's When the dealer Jacques Goudstikker fled Amsterdam in 1940, he left behind his artworks but was able to take the notebook tracking his inventory. It would later be crucial to the recovery of his art. Winning the property was a highly competitive effort; for weeks before Christie's confirmed it had won, there had been rumors that the sale was going to Sotheby's. Asked how the family decided, Mrs. von Saher would say only, "It was a business decision we made as a group." Christie's has handled several celebrated restitution properties. Last year it negotiated the sale of the five Klimt paintings relinquished by Austria after a long legal battle, selling four at auction in May and helping arrange the $135 million sale of the fifth, "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," to Ronald S. Lauder for his Neue Galerie in New York. A year after the Austrian government returned some 250 works to the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family in 1998, Christie's auctioned more than 200 of them for nearly $90 million at a landmark sale in London. Mrs. von Saher never knew her father-in-law, and her husband was not yet 3 when his father died. But she said that in 1946 her mother-in-law returned to the Netherlands and went back to the gallery. "Everything was gone," Mrs. von Saher said. "But a person from the gallery came out with a big blanket under his arm and in it was a painting of two young girls by Berthe Morisot." That painting now hangs in her Greenwich home, Mrs. von Saher said, and is one of her favorite possessions. Christie's Jacopo del Casentino's "Saint Mary" is among the dozens of works being auctioned in April at Christie's in New York.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007 :::

Canciones folclóricas de la Ultraderecha Norteamericana.

"Folk Songs of the Far Right Wing."

Para ver el video promocional de: "Canciones folclóricas de la Ultraderecha Norteamericana." haga "click" sobre la imagen superior.

Tambien deleitese con los videos: "Papi tiene un nuevo Baghdad" y "Sorpresa de la Agencia de Seguridad Norteamericana"

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