Gianfranco Ferre: Lessons in Fashion (Mode) - Tapa blanda

The first book to reveal the fashion ideology of one of the most renowned Italian designers. Gianfranco Ferr was known as the architect of fashion (he graduated with a degree in architecture from Politecnico University in Milan). In his long career, he delivered hundreds of lectures on fashion in schools around the world. Those lectures have been preserved and are now collected in this book together with an unpublished selection of sketches and photographs, and bear a most faithful and original witness to his ideas on couture. "Fashion is logic, method, system. It is work. Indeed, fashion involves many different kinds of work: that of the draftsman, the dressmaker and the tailor, the artisan, the technician... Enthusiasm and dedication are needed. And curiosity, in the sense of a continual search for stimuli. And culture in the sense of an understanding of other people's experiences, of the expressions of human knowledge, of different horizons and the most varied ways of life. A brief word of advice? Explore and experiment, work and know exactly what you want. And above all, never forget that fashion is also a dream."--Gianfranco Ferr

Maria Luisa Frisa is director of the graduate course in fashion design at the IUAV in Venice, and fashion curator of the Fondazione Pitti Discovery. She is also editor of the Mode series.