Rosa Genoni

Rosa Genoni was born in Tirano (Sondrio) in 1897. Her father was a cobbler and her mother a tailor. Rosa was the eldest daughter of eighteen brothers and sisters. After moving to Milan at one of her aunts’, the girl coming from Valtellina mountains, began a process of de-provincialization that would take her around Europe and then back to Italy but enriched with the experience she had gained in transalpine countries. As a child she was a piscinina, assistant tailor; in youth, a night school student in order to learn French and an apprentice dressmaker; in maturity, a successful fashion designer, master of tailoring and teacher of costume history, labor movements activist and publicist; in the Great War years, a pacifist; during fascism a dissident.

She did more than “just” creating; she “theorized” the creative act, clarifying and making clear the ideological motivations, the political aims, the sources of inspiration that she had been looking for in nature and art history, giving back to Italian fashion that primacy in originality which had been stolen by centuries of subservience to French models. Rosa Genoni also realized the importance of an efficient communication in promoting innovations by using the freelance journalist’s channels (accompanied by photography more than drawing) and the exhibition ones, to convey her fashion project of “pure Italian art”.

Therefore Rosa Genoni was the protagonist of an authentic story of emancipation: of herself, from the social marginality she had been destined to by her the humble background; of the women textile workers from the ties of little education and mortifying working conditions; of the female body from the constraints of an often uncomfortable and unnatural clothing and, finally, of the Italian fashion from the servitude to the dictates of French fashion.