Futurismo Now: A Conceptual Menswear Fashion Collection Exploring Masculinity through Futurist Aesthetics An Exhibition of Conceptual Fashion Collection

The Futurism Art movement and its manifestoes had a crucial impact on European literature, art, and fashion. This practice-based research project is an exploration of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, Donaldson…) through the lens of the Italian Futurism movement. My goal was to produce a conceptual menswear collection using Giacomo Balla’s “The Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing” as the main design framework. This research dissects aspects of hegemonic masculinity and compares them with masculine tendencies that characterized the work of the Futurism movement. Through this study I meant to investigate if, by applying design elements and themes promoted by futurist artists, my menswear designs could reflect contemporary masculinities.

Futurismo Now: A Conceptual Menswear Fashion Collection Exploring Masculinity through Futurist Aesthetics An Exhibition of Conceptual Fashion Collection

The Futurism Art movement and its manifestoes had a crucial impact on European literature, art, and fashion. This practice-based research project is an exploration of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, Donaldson…) through the lens of the Italian Futurism movement. My goal was to produce a conceptual menswear collection using Giacomo Balla’s “The Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing” as the main design framework. This research dissects aspects of hegemonic masculinity and compares them with masculine tendencies that characterized the work of the Futurism movement. Through this study I meant to investigate if, by applying design elements and themes promoted by futurist artists, my menswear designs could reflect contemporary masculinities.

El mito aéreo en el futurismo italiano: del periodo heroico a la espiritualidad aérea (1909-1944) The aerial myth of Itanian futurism: from the heroic period to the aerial spirituality (1909-1944)

La poética de lo aéreo atravesó transversalmente la historia del futurismo italiano. El undécimo punto de su manifiesto y fundación en 1909, hizo referencia al aeroplano como una máquina esencial para comprender que la vida y el arte se debían someter a un mundo en permanente transformación. Lo aéreo y sus implicaciones compusieron proclamas y manifiestos determinando la creación literaria y artística del periodo heroico. En los años treinta, cuando el futurismo planteaba su supervivencia en el complejo contexto social y político italiano, la aeropintura se convirtió en su línea oficial. Un perfil que, desde ese mismo momento, se bifurcó en dos tendencias complementarias: la dedicada a una praxis orgánica de las variables de la mirada aérea y la de una política representacional que superaba lo aéreo para penetrar en lo trascendente. Con la desaparición de las líneas de identificación entre estética y política, la temática aérea adquirió el rol de propaganda del régimen, celebración de la guerra-fiesta, que recuperaba el discurso intervencionista de la Primera Guerra Mundial y que, tras un periodo de manifestaciones de escaso valor plástico, concluyó abruptamente con el deceso del futurismo que coincidió con el nuevo ciclo histórico que se inició en Italia. The poetics of the aerial went through the history of Italian futurism. In 1909, the eleventh point of his manifesto and foundation referred to the airplane as an essential machine for understanding that life and art should be submitted to a world in permanent transformation. The aerial and its implications composed proclamations and manifestos which determined the literary and artistic evolution of the heroic period. In the 1930s, when futurism was planning its survival in the complex social and political context of Italy, aeropainting became its official line. A profile that bifurcated into two complementary tendencies from that very moment: one devoted to an organic practice of the aerial gaze variables and the other to a representational policy which went beyond the aerial to penetrate the transcendent. With the disappearance of the lines of distinction between aesthetics and politics, the aerial theme acquired the function of the regime's propaganda. It was the celebration of the war-fest that restored the interventionist rhetoric of the First World War and which, after a period of demonstrations of little plastic interest, ended abruptly with the death of Futurism, coinciding with the new historical cycle that began in Italy.

The image of a machine in Italian futurism: manifests, music, painting

The 20th century became a new epoch in the development of the European civilization which projected images begotten by the process of technological transformation of reality into an artistic space. The quick growth of technologies and the industrialization of all spheres of life were reflected in the works of artists in urbanized images of reality. One of these images was a machine as an embodiment of speed and technical progress. Being a central motive of the main idea of the Italian futurism (the most dynamic branch of modernism), the image of a car penetrated into all artistic spheres of the Italian art of the 1910s - the 1930s, most notably: literature, (embodied, first of all, in the futurists’ manifests, devoted to a Machine); music (the noise music by B. Pratella and L. Russolo), and art (machine painting). The interest in the avant-garde visual art of the 1920s - the 1930s, including the Italian futurism, has been growing recently. Many scientific articles and monographs by foreign authors focus on technical aspects of this ambiguous flamboyant direction: the images of electricity, urban architecture, machines and mechanisms. But the Russian scientific literature lacks in-depth studies of these aspects of futurism. This article is supposed to become the first step on the way of studying the “machine” aspect of futurism, i.e. its historical background, development, and the influence of the image which formed the basis for the main idea of the creator of the direction more than a century ago. The authors consider the use of the image of a machine in various artistic fields: literature, music, art, and provide a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon.   

Italian Futurism and the Explosive ‘Now’

This chapter examines the development and changing artistic and socio-political implications of a particular temporal modality—‘the present as history’—within a variety of Futurist texts. It draws on the work of Frederic Jameson to argue that the Italian Futurists sought to radically disrupt a particular representation of the present in their calls to destroy the past and attempts to endow futurity with the urgency of fully embodied agency. Wittman argues that the Futurists reject a specific, historicist, bourgeois understanding of history and seek to inaugurate a new sense of time, an explosive ‘now’. Comparing early and later texts by Marinetti and other Futurists, and identifying their debts to anarchist thought, the chapter demonstrates that their strategy of breaking into the present can only counter totalitarian appropriations if it remains anchored in embodied practices.