'Fiorucci Was Not A Designer' - Curator Judith Clark on Defining Cultural Impact

When Elio Fiorucci (1935-2015) opened his first boutique in Milan in 1967 he transformed how we the consumer experience clothes shopping and fashion marketing. Fiorucci came to represent everything that was modern, irreverent, audacious and fun and, his zany boutique became the place to see and be seen. It was a shop, a destination and a happening. Not surprisingly Fiorucci became a great success and opened another twenty stores worldwide. Andy Warhol likened the launch party of the New York store to a club night at Studio 54. The first monograph exhibition to explore the maverick’s life and work, commissioned by and for the Triennale de Milano, is open until next month.

The show’s curator, Judith Clark, has brought together an extensive and remarkable collection of – previously unseen - unpublished artwork relating to Fiorucci’s many projects. These include items lent by artists, architects and designers and personal ephemera drawn from archives of his family and creative collaborators. Fiorucci has international renown but Clark, who grew up in Rome gets the deep affection with which he is held in Italy.

We met at her London gallery, Judith Clark Studio, in Golborne Road to discuss her curatorial interventions and decision making. Clark trained as an architect and usually works as an exhibition maker, a practice that involves designing and integrating the scenography with the curatorial decision making in terms of narrative themes, selecting, juxtaposing and displaying objects, images, film etc. When I encountered her first major exhibition, Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back at MoMu - Fashion Museum Antwerp (2004), re-presented as Malign Muses at the V&A (2005), I thought ‘this changes everything!’ Clark’s erudite, poetic, hauntingly beautiful, deeply sensitive and provocative work challenged conventions and re-configured how we experience fashion exhibitions and archives. She is every bit the iconoclast as her subject.

Amy de la Haye: Can you describe the complexities and difficulties you encountered with this exhibition?

Judith Clark: Of course. First of all it is important to underline that Fiorucci was not a designer. He was an extraordinary motivator of projects and collaborator, with a keen instinct for what would now come under the umbrella of marketing. He was, for example, prescient of the idea of the shop as a place for social encounters. But, this means is that it is very hard to draw a line around his work. There are also a great many competing accounts of who did what and when. So, one of the major curatorial dilemmas was how to situate him, his actual role, within the thousands of objects that remain from his many projects.

I discovered that a series of interviews, taped by a friend of his Alessandra Albarello at the end of his life, had been conducted with a view to her writing his autobiography. They were the starting point of a project, casually narrated due to the affection he held for his interlocutor. Fiorucci tells her to check his facts as they would be unreliable - and I felt this was key to the show - we needed to check facts that were sometimes impossible to ascertain, but that didn’t disqualify looking at them.

His taped voice creates one of the main 'routes' through the show - I selected just a few minutes from 17 hours, and often chose the most informal of phrases: 'passaparola', 'passaparola', he tells us, revealing that at the heart of his method were encounters, in the shops, the disco, or on the road. His own memories also alerted me to moments that absolutely help us read the material through a different lens: for example he recounts escaping Milan during the bombing in WWII to a rural idyll. It is difficult to look at the escapism within his preferred projects (the colours, the symbols of travel, cartoons, etc) now without his personal history in mind.

ADLH: Why did you create an exhibition as a biography of Elio Fiorucci, rather than a history of the brand?

JC: It was clear from the start that the project was about placing Fiorucci amongst the protagonists of Italian design which is the Triennale's brief. They recover histories and are also doing extraordinary work around archiving, conserving and, making archives accessible. There was no doubt it would be hard - as there could always be an expectation that this would be a fashion exhibition. However, it was important to show the breadth of Fiorucci's contribution: that it was as much around how fashion was sourced and sold as the fashion itself. And that those projects came out of collaborating with architects such as Mendini, Branzi, De Lucchi; or inviting Warhol to sign copies of Interview magazine (in his New York shop) - as Warhol himself understood, harnessing fame, or artists such as Keith Haring, Antonio Lopez…

ADLH: Which archives did you explore?

JC: The exhibits are drawn from the Fiorucci corporate archive; Franco Marabelli's archive of ephemera dedicated to Fiorucci - as he worked as an architect and art director for Fiorucci for many years - and, Elio Fiorucci's sister Floria who runs Love Therapy (the company Elio Fiorucci was involved with until the end of his life) who holds perhaps the largest archive. We also were offered key items along the way from his collaborators - in true Fiorucci style by word-of-mouth and we were offered things up until the night before. Giannino Malossi who ran the research arm of Fiorucci [DXING] lent us a selection of books from his library to create a moment in the show to reflect on where this material sits within broader ideas around pop culture at the time, for example, that all fed into the Fiorucci idiom.

ADLH: Did you discover a lot of new material?

JC: A huge portion of work within the exhibition has never been published before - and so I was delighted to be able to include so many images in the catalogue. Some of the work in progress drawings for posters and proposed zines for example, art work for menus, fliers for events, it goes on and on. My favourite, perhaps, are the travel albums by the extraordinary artist Mirella Clemencigh, who also worked as Fiorucci’s buyer and designer and Tito Pastore, his long term Art Director, two extraordinarily talented collaborators who should be household names…

ADLH: How did you collaborate with theater director and scenographer Fabio Cherstich who designed the exhibition?

JC: I loved working with Fabio, and in a way enacting the spirit of the show which is as much about collaboration as anything else. He brought his theatrical assumptions to the table - time, rhythm, which is so often static in exhibitions, for him is alive - we ‘meet’ objects in time, Fiorucci’s voice was a ‘character’ a layer in the story. It was thrilling having those conversations together. We decided that the show needed to acknowledge the dynamism of Fiorucci’s style creating collaged vistas, whilst keeping one central narrative table running the length of the exhibition that would be the thesis, the biography.

ADLH: What is your personal perspective?

JC: I grew up with Fiorucci. A local shop in Rome had a Fiorucci concession so - as a child - I had access to the famous stickers, pencil cases, T-shirts etc. There is a lot of nostalgia around Fiorucci - every interview in Italy that I have given has started with the journalist telling me of their own collection, experience, it has been wonderful to hear these stories multiply. The Triennale have set up an email to receive all the stories but also corrections, additions. So many of the works came un-signed, undated, that this is a great opportunity to start the long task of attribution.

ELIO FIORUCCI (1935-2015)

Triennale di Milano, 5 November 2024 - 16 March 2025

Curator: Judith Clark 

Exhibition Design: Fabio Cherstich