Cinzia Ruggeri. Vestire le emozioni

The paper offers an in-depth analysis on Cinzia Ruggeri’s design path, a theme not much studied nowadays, relying on unpublished archive documents, oral sources and critical review of the existing literature. The aim of the contribution is to depict the composite panorama of 1980s Italy as a lively laboratory, a sort of harbinger of the successful “Made in Italy” label. Art as an essential starting point for fashion design and experimentation on clothing, and as a stage of research extended to an environmental scale, declined in a sentimental way of living the space: these words describe the journey of Cinzia Ruggeri, the artist and designer that in the 1980s was crowned as the “archi-stilista” and “artstilista” of the Milanese prêt-à-porter. Her creations manifested the will to experiment and the taste for technological research, such as the usage of liquid crystals on textiles, an innovation that makes the dress an outer mirror of the body, or of luminous LEDs between the frills of an evening dress that lit up with a gesture. Together with Alchimia and Occhiomagico, Ruggeri intertwined the different areas of design culture and transformed the covers of the magazine Domus into a manifesto of postmodern aesthetic. Besides dress, considered something that both clothes the body and adapts to the expression of emotions, Ruggeri’s researches extended to domestic and not-domestic environment.