What do Bulgari, Fendi and Armani all have in common? Yes they’re all legendary Italian fashion houses, but they’re also all designers who have dressed the characters in Dario Argento’s horror movies. Ostensibly he might not seem like a trend-setter, but if MSGM’s Autumn/Winter collections are anything to go by that’s exactly what he’s about to become. If there’s one thing that Argento prizes above all other things it’s aesthetics. With that in mind it should come as no surprise that the clothes and costumes worn in his films are as meticulously thought out as his magnificent set pieces are lit and filmed. Making them the perfect source of inspiration for Massimo Giorgetti’s MSGM label.
Dario Argento is a household name in Italy, but outside of his native territory he is only well known to cineastes and movie buffs. Born in Rome, Argento is the son of Salvatore Argento a film producer and Elsa Luzardo a successful fashion photographer. His path towards becoming a director began when he started working as a film critic, writing for magazines and newspapers while still studying at school, much like Godard and Truffaut had done before him. Before long he was working as a screenwriter on Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns and collaborating with Bertolucci on Once Upon a Time in the West. Westerns made up the majority of Italy’s film output in the 1960’s but at the same time directors like Mario Bava were quietly creating a whole sub-genre of what would turn out to be extremely influential horror/thriller movies dubbed ‘Giallo’ (the Italian word for yellow). This sub-genre, so named because the books their stories came from always had yellow cover designs, became an obsession for Argento. Their baroque settings, sumptuous lighting and gorgeous female stars subjected to brutal violence acted as a microcosm of Italian artistic sensibilities.
In comparison to the chaste cinema of the 1960’s, the 1970’s would be a decade of films typified by a seismic change in societal values, driven by the European arthouse movement. Nudity and brutal, realistic violence became the markers for this new wave of directors railing against the establishment they felt had stifled the artistry of their predecessors. The 1970’s would become a golden age for horror movies, but also for film in general. This decade remains a key phase in cinematic history as it marks the fruition of the first generation of directors who had grown up with TV sets – they had unprecedented access to films, TV shows and even soap operas and the adverts they brought with them. This access birthed the first generation of truly savvy and cinema literate directors, able to draw references and inspiration from diverse sources and an overload of accessible visual content. George Lucas’ Star Wars drew references from everything from Akira Kurosawa’s Samurai films to the Saturday morning made-for-kids serials like Flash Gordon.
While Argento would never make the same impact as George Lucas or create a ‘blockbuster’ like Spielberg’s Jaws or Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, he was of the same generation of filmmakers, auteurs who were each carving out their own unique style and rewriting the rulebook on just what cinema could do and what it could be. Having made the transition from critic to more creative roles working with Italian cinema giants Bertolucci and Leone, Argento began work on what would become his directorial debut. The first three films in the Argento oeuvre are known as the ‘animal trilogy’. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) were a trilogy of thrillers in the giallo style which were all huge hits in his native Italy. His next feature in this genre, 1975’s Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) is widely considered to be the finest example of giallo ever committed to film. Deep Red’s success went beyond the Italian market and became an international success. These films featured tortuous, protracted set-pieces that blended Hitchcockian suspense with baroque interiors and virtuoso camera work. The killer in Argento films almost invariably wears black leather gloves; close-ups of the gloved hand plunging blades into the bodies of his victims are an Argento signature. In fact, the gloved hand is always that of Argento himself. He likes to make sure the violence is enacted in as aesthetically beautiful a way as possible.
Argento took the directorial baton for giallo from Mario Bava, a personal hero and source of inspiration for him; but adopted the new creative freedoms that 1970’s cinema brought with it, pushing the genre forward into a new era. The violence and sexualised content was ramped up to sublime effect. The international success of Deep Red put Argento onto the map in a way he hadn’t been before, allowing his style to influence and inspire others. John Carpenter has spoken at length about how these early Argento films inspired his seminal masterpiece Halloween (1978) a film that itself kickstarts the American ‘slasher’ genre – an interpretation of Italy’s Giallo.
To Massimo Giorgetti, Argento is a home-grown hero, he’s been a die-hard fan since his teenage years. Retrospectively is easy to see a touch of Argento in the MSGM design ethos – even if it’s just in colour palette or femme fatale styling. But both men are so resolutely obsessed with aesthetics that it’s easy to imagine how much they have in common. The accompanying posters for Argento’s animal trilogy form the basis of many of MSGM’s prints for both the men’s and women’s collections. These highly graphic and stylised images of cats, birds and flies are turned into repeat patterns on Massimo Giorgetti’s blouses, pleated skirts and silk shirts. These uniquely vintage images evoke the cinema of a different era, one reflected in MSGM’s idiosyncratic designs. Brash and colourful the MSGM palette is perfectly in keeping with Argento’s trippy, kaleidoscopic colour scheme for his most famous work Suspiria (1977). Filmed on out of date 1950’s technicolour film stock Argento had no idea how the finished film would look, but the effect would turn out to be sublimely lurid, almost hallucinatory. A swirling mix of psychedelic colours denote the films central character descending into near madness as she unpicks a mystery to uncover a coven of witches behind the ballet school she has enrolled in. Giorgetti expands on this boarding school look with tweeds, blazers and prim shirting – imagining a modern wardrobe for Argento’s characters. Babydoll dresses in what can only be described as blood red and chunky mary-janes are a distinctly Argentoesque take on womenswear.
Vivid colours have always been a trademark of Massimo Giorgetti’s designs, Italian design isn’t renowned for its subtlety. Aesthetically speaking maximalism has always been at the core of Italian designs, in most creative fields. Many reviews of these MSGM collections have mentioned this, expressing shock that Giorgetti would find inspiration in horror films when he is so intrinsically linked to clothes so colourful people perceive them to be happy and fun. But these people are perhaps unfamiliar with this genre of Italian cinema, or the notion that under the eye of Argento, a bright colour palette can be just as terrifying as a mis-en-scene typified by darkness and shadows. The leather gloves, a signifier of death to Argento, are rendered in shocking pink and crimson red by MSGM.
It’s clear that these MSGM collections are a love letter to Argento’s films, which must evoke a youthful nostalgia for the designer but they are also a way to pay tribute to a filmmaker who never managed to gain the same commercial success as some of his contemporaries. Through this unlikely collaboration Giorgetti has recontextualised his design ethos while simultaneously elevating the legacy of Argento. But this isn’t Argento’s first time in the world of runway fashion shows. In 1986 he directed a catwalk show for traditional Italian fashion house Trussardi. Founded in 1911 Trussardi was originally a leather glove manufacturer, making the kind of gloves one imagines the murderer in an Argento film might wear. For this extraordinary event, part performance art, part fashion show, he recreated the rainstorm that opens Suspiria, models drenched in water paraded the catwalk, soaking wet. For the denouement a model is brutally attacked by two men on the stage. She is stabbed in classic Argento style and collapses on stage before being wrapped in a plastic sheet and dragged down the runway. Trussardi were clearly not afraid of controversy. So while this kind of spectacle may have proven a step too far for Giorgetti one thing is clear; Italian fashion owes a debt to Argento, one that they are paying back slowly, over time.