A book that takes accessories seriously
Lo stile eterno. Gli accessori dell’eleganza maschile (The eternal style. The accessories of men’s elegance) is the new book by Gian Luca Bauzano, journalist and curator, a Corriere della Sera writer who has covered fashion and costume for years. It came out in June with Marsilio Editori in the Mestieri d’Arte series, edited by Fondazione Cologni dei Mestieri d’Arte, with an introduction by its general director Alberto Cavalli.
The title comes from a line by Yves Saint Laurent and says at once where the book stands: style on one side, the passing of fashions on the other. Across its two hundred and eighty-eight pages file the objects a man chooses and then keeps for years. The shirt, the tie, the bow tie, the pocket square and the boutonnière, the cufflinks, the hat, the cane, the umbrella. And gloves, which in lists like this one tend to be named last, and which here have their own space instead.
Alongside the portraits of contemporary men, part of the book concerns the ateliers, the training and the schools: those who make those objects and those who will learn to make them.
Who wanted this book
Fondazione Cologni dei Mestieri d’Arte was founded in Milan in 1995 at the wish of Franco Cologni, who is its president. It is a private non-profit institution and for thirty years it has been doing something simple to say and hard to do: it keeps the crafts alive by telling their story, studying them and taking young people into the workshops to learn them. The Mestieri d’Arte and Ricerche series, published with Marsilio, reconstruct their history. The project Una Scuola, un Lavoro accompanies young people into the workshops. The title of MAM, Maestro d’Arte e Mestiere, recognises those who practise that knowledge every day.
When an institution like this asks to tell the story of your work, it is not asking for the shop window. It is asking for the bench. That is why we answered gladly, opening the archive and letting the tools be photographed.
Restelli, beauty is a family story
This is the title of the pages Bauzano devotes to the company, in the section of the book called Gli artefici dell’eleganza, the makers of elegance. The account starts in 1920, when Raffaella Restelli’s grandparents opened in corso Sempione, where the business still stands today. It passes through the nineteen fifties, when Piero and Enrica, Raffaella’s parents, introduced the Sport collection and the waterproof peccary glove lined with opossum became a recognisable mark of the jet set. It arrives at Raffaella, who took up the craft of her grandparents and her parents.
What struck us is the author’s choice to describe the method rather than the image: leathers bought in crust, selected according to use, city or snow, according to gender and according to colour, and then the work at the bench, the moment when the glove acquires its soul. This is exactly how we work, and it is rare to see it set down in writing. Our search for new materials and new techniques never stops, Raffaella says in these pages.
A hammer that has been working for more than eighty years
A copy on the atelier table
The book is in bookshops and on the online platforms. Our copy has stayed on the atelier table, and now and then someone leafs through it between one operation and the next. That the glove, among the accessories of men’s style, holds a place that needs no claiming is something we already knew. Seeing it written by someone else makes a certain impression.
The Italian artisan gloves that come from that bench can be found in our online shop and, from mid October, at corso Magenta 32, where our temporary shop returns.
To Fondazione Cologni go our heartfelt thanks. It tells the story of the crafts with a seriousness that is rarely met, and it reminds the reader that behind a well made object there is always a hand that learned, and someone who taught it. That they wanted our art in that story too, an art that has been working with gloves for more than a hundred years, is what we take with us from this summer.
