Theodora in Paris, 1990

Romeo Gigli showed his spring 1990 collection in Paris, and the moment that survived was not a silhouette but a sound. Kirsten Owen came out wrapped in a fringe of large glass beads, the kind blown on Murano in the Venetian lagoon, with long pendant earrings and a glass diadem set into her hair. Tim Blanks, returning to the show decades later, described her as the model embodiment of Gigli's fragile, romantic ideal, and wrote that she could have been the Byzantine empress Theodora. The beads tinkled like wind chimes while she walked. Then they began to shatter.

That detail is the whole argument of the collection in miniature. Gigli was reaching back to Venice as a former Byzantine province, pulling a thousand years of craft into a runway, and the material refused to behave like a costume. Glass is not a sensible thing to hang on a moving body. It rings, it catches light, and it breaks. He used it anyway, because the breaking was part of the point. Beauty that survives intact is just decoration. Beauty that comes apart as you watch is something closer to an event.

Gigli's reputation rested on this kind of soft refusal. While the late eighties were busy with power shoulders and hard tailoring, he was making cocoon coats, cutaway jackets that skimmed rather than gripped, high-waisted trousers as skinny as leggings, and skirts that swaddled the legs in a tulip shape. The palette ran to jewel-toned silks, earthy velvets, shadowy chiffons and gilded gauzes. It read as romantic, even nostalgic, but the construction underneath was precise. He was not draping fabric for atmosphere. He was building a quieter proposition about how a woman might occupy space without armouring herself into it.

There is a useful contrast with Azzedine Alaïa's almost exactly contemporary work, where the body was mapped and held by seaming engineered to the millimetre. Alaïa controlled the body through tension. Gigli let it dissolve into folds and shadow. Both were arguing against the decade's appetite for rigidity, but from opposite ends. One sculpted, the other veiled. The Murano beads belong to the veiling instinct, a surface that hides as much as it shows and announces its own fragility while doing so.

The show was his Paris debut and it landed at the peak of his influence, with a standing ovation. That timing is worth sitting with, because the peak was already close to the edge. Gigli had launched his label in 1983, with production handled by Zamasport from 1985, and by 1991 the structure around him fractured. He split from his business partners Donato Maiano and Carla Sozzani in a traumatic separation that dragged on for more than a decade, the kind of dispute that slowly separates a designer from his own name. The Gigli trademark was eventually sold to IT Holding in 1999. The romantic who made glass sing in 1990 spent much of the rest of the decade in litigation over who got to use the word that was his surname.

I find the spring 1990 show more moving for knowing that. It is not just a pretty piece of Byzantine revivalism. It is a designer at his most assured, making a material that was guaranteed to break, in the same few years that his own commercial footing was about to. The beads shattering on the runway look, in retrospect, less like a flourish and more like a forecast nobody in the room could have read. The same instinct that built something exquisite and doomed into a single walk was the one the business could not protect.

Sources:

Tim Blanks' Top Fashion Shows of All-Time: Romeo Gigli Spring/Summer 1990 — The Business of Fashion

Romeo Gigli — Encyclopedia.com

Gigli, Romeo — Vintage Fashion Guild