Borsalino Da’ I Numeri FW 12-13
Pitti Immagine Florence,
Curated and directed by Elisa Fulco
Quando La Creatività’ Da I Numeri….
Anila Rubiku
The ‘abstractness’ of numbers has always frightened me, but so too has the truth with which they recreate and re-propose reality. Numbers talk, record life, mark time. So, when I began to work with Borsalino on the theme of its new collection “Borsalino dà i numeri” I saw it as a perfect opportunity to play with them, starting from the precise and unequivocal measurements of the hat. As an artist, I can offer imagination and creativity which upset and make reality go haywire. However, when working with such a historic company, this must be done with great consideration, knowing that we are working within a cultural background to which my participation must be added and improve the quality and excellence which already exists.
To the values of the brand I have added the artisan tradition of my country, Albania, which has always been centred on manual work in which embroidery continues to be handed down from generation to generation. In the Borsalino collection, in addition to the numbers, I have added the gestural expressiveness of the hand, which harks back to manual work and the care that is needed to handle a hat, it is taken with two fingers, gently placed back down, brushed as if it were something precious.
I like to think that by taking care of the hat we take care of ourselves, as if by wearing it we become more aware of what we are and what we would like to be…
As if by magic HATS PROTECT IDEAS*.
*HATS PROTECT IDEAS The project of Fondazione Borsalino, which supports contemporary art, takes its name from the installation by the artist Anila Rubiku, presented at the 2011 Venice Biennial. Each year an artist is invited to confront himself with the materials of the historical archive and with the Borsalino style office to create a limited edition hat collection or works which interpret the business culture from a contemporary angle .
To highlight its 155 years of life Borsalino, born on 4-4-1857, goes haywire and bets on its own history, pulling out of the hat everything that the accessory has contained and concealed over time: taking the form of numbers, out come sizes, circumferences, stitching, proportions, fibre weights, colour doses, production stages, but also the value of tradition and the transmission of knowledge. Numbers which are both recordable and immaterial.
How do you measure experience? What value does time have?
Does quality have a price?
Among business figures, secret and invented numbers (when you have a certain age you start to reason faultily) the new Fall Winter 2012/13 Borsalino collection is unveiled. It rotates around the recipe/search for the perfect hat, which looks at the aura of proportion able to keep together shape and beauty, utility and elegance, quality and innovation and why not.. a touch of madness!
Studying the numbers of its past, Borsalino gives life to a new re-proportioning of the hat, in millimetres, in which the ratio between head and face between brim and circumference is rebalanced, the variations of the aesthetic eastern and western canon are both considered to create the 392012 model, “the perfect hat”.
Inspired by the historic Borsalino Archive, the new collection recovers the classical colours of the Maison, making them modern and contemporary, bringing changes to the historic mixes and studying innovative combinations. The “Neri perfetti” are born, an elegant series of shades of Blacks obtained by calibrating the “perfect proportions” of pigment weight from Morello (black verging on brown), to Bakarole (black verging on red), from Scarabeo (black verging on green), to Abisso (black verging on blue) and finally Buio (black verging on grey).
The innovation which stems from tradition leads Borsalino to recover its historic skill to research and cooperate with artists and designers, this time through the eyes of the contemporary artist Anila Rubiku who, inspired by an image of the historic archive, creates a capsule collection of hats dedicated to the theme of proportions and the evocative strength of numbers.