“Cinzia Says…”: Fashion’s Surrealist Queen Gets Her First Major Retrospective

In the world of Cinzia Ruggeri— the multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work is the subject of an expansive new exhibition at the MACRO Rome — fashion, architecture, and nature mingle promiscuously, ecstatically. Dresses are not just dresses, but buildings: their structured, multi-tiered skirts are tailored to evoke the storeys of ancient temples. Blades of grass drip from the fingertips of delicate, mesh gloves. Even manicured shrubs sport glossy, MA-1 bomber jackets zipped loosely over their leafy bodies. No object is safe from being drawn into the playful fray. All things are eligible for adornment.

Titled Cinzia Says…, the MACRO exhibition is the first of its scale to tackle Ruggeri’s oeuvre, which encompasses multiple clothing lines as well as sculptures, furniture pieces, costumes and set designs. Although well known in Italy and amongst connoisseurs of fashion history, her work is only beginning to receive recognition from international audiences (a state of affairs that the Gucci-sponsored exhibition will surely help remedy). 

Born in Milan in 1942, Ruggeri spent her early years studying design at the city’s Accademia della Arti Applicate. She secured her first exhibition at Milan’s Galleria del Prisma when she was only 17 years old, before she had even received her official art school credentials. After design stints at the French fashion house Carven and her father’s ready-to-wear firm Unimac SpA, she founded her first fashion line, Bloom SpA, in 1977. In 1982, she launched a second line — the eponymous Cinzia Ruggeri label — as well as a menswear label in 1986.

Ruggeri’s runway presentations were far from traditional, often involving aspects of art, music, and performance, as well as the garments themselves. One show (held in the decidedly non-traditional venue of the Church of San Carpoforo) even featured sound-emitting light installations designed by Brian Eno. By the late 1980s, however, Ruggeri had begun to move away from runway presentations and focus instead on furniture, sculpture, and installation pieces. During this time, she was also a frequent collaborator of Studio Alchimia — the influential, avant-garde design group formed in reaction to the stringencies of the Bauhaus movement — though she never opted to become an official member.

Across its diverse mediums, Ruggeri’s practice confounded divisions between nature and artifice, human and object, body and building. Take, for example, her 1983 piece Guanto-borsa schiaffo, or Slap-glove bag, a surreal, hand/bag chimera which requires its wearer to merge their hand with the accessory itself. There are also her iconic “Ziggurat” dresses, whose severe, staircase-like silhouettes transform the human figure into something architectural. The installation design of the MACRO exhibition, which has many of Ruggeri’s pieces suspended from the museum ceiling, does much to enhance this dreamlike, chimerical sensibility. Floating in mid-air, her garments appear to have drifted in from another world: one free from the bounds of gravity itself.

To focus only on the whimsical aspects of Ruggeri’s oeuvre, however, would be to ignore another, equally compelling aspect of her body of work: her early (and remarkably prescient) experiments with textiles and technology. Years before Hussein Chalayalan would install 15,400 LEDs in a single dress for his iconic A/W 2007 collection, Ruggeri was creating luminescent, LED-studded garments of her own. She also explored the idea of temperature-changing fabrics and was fascinated with the idea of introducing a more kinetic, dynamic aspect to fashion. It is this commitment to driving design forward that is, in the end, the most striking aspect of Ruggeri’s legacy. Though she once claimed that “the only way to survive is not to have a temporal identity,” she nonetheless had one: she was a woman of the future.

Cinzia Says… is on view at the MACRO Rome until August 28th. It then travels to Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London, where it will be on view from October 8, 2022 – January 15, 2023.