Posters by Rinascente

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of the advertising poster started to spread from France, adding a dash of colour to walls in big cities. In those crucial years, when the urban, political and retail landscapes were all undergoing great change with the diffusion of industrial and serial products, the poster fully met a new need for visual communication that had to be effective, immediate and for the masses. It used evocative, simplified images to spread messages of a political, cultural and commercial nature.

Industrial companies and department stores were the first to realise and fully exploit the huge potential of this new means of communication, which could reach every social class and which went hand in hand with their process of democratising consumption.

Described by the critic Vittorio Pica as “a humble art form that, even in its ephemeral glory—faded by the sun, soaked and stained by the rain, and ripped by the wind—corresponds amazingly to the whirling intensity of our big cities,” the advertising poster is not just considered artistic expression in the true sense, but is also an important iconographic document of the various human manifestations, a modern expression of the new society.

The oldest Rinascente poster in the collection is the historic one by Aldo Mazza in 1921. It announces the reopening after the fire with the symbolic image of a black log sprouting delicate pale green shoots. The newest posters are those for the inauguration of the new headquarters in Milan, rebuilt after the air raids during the war, on which the new lR logo by Huber stands proud, together with some late works by Marcello Dudovich, dated 1955.

The collection includes posters by Mario Bazzi, Gino Boccasile, Leonetto Cappiello, Aldo Mazza, Walter Resentera, Nanni Schipani, Renato Vernizzi, and, especially, Marcello Dudovich.

The subjects illustrated represent the different Rinascente sales sectors, fashion in particular, with a prevalence of posters that announce the season’s new items.

There are also many posters for gifts and toys, articles for the home, holidays and sport, as well as posters advertising the periodic “linen festivals”.

This small yet valuable collection is an important documentary source for a better understanding of Rinascente’s commercial and communication strategies before the introduction of modern graphic design in the fifties.

The message the company wanted to communicate can in fact be perceived from the images in the posters. When Senator Borletti bought Rinascente in 1917, his aim was to raise the tone of the department store, combining value for money with high quality through materials, style and good taste, setting himself the objective of bring art closer to life. To increase the value of his products and to attract middle-class customers, the department store focused hugely on visual communication, with refined illustrations on advertising posters.

The collection, comprising almost 100 works by Marcello Dudovich, including posters and sketches, also gives better insight into the knowledge of this great poster designer and above all of the thirty-year relationship between the artist and the department store. From 1921 to 1956, Dudovich designed almost all Rinascente’s advertising posters, linking his style code to the department store’s image. This collaboration marked an era in the history of this company and artistic advertising in general, with posters that have become part of the collective imagination.

The women depicted by this poster artist from Trieste are young, elegant, emancipated, and, at times, enigmatic under huge hats that hide their eyes.

They are both homemakers, attentive to their households, and worldly wise, always ready to travel, with a style suitable for the mountains, the sea or the countryside, as the occasion demands.

Refined at social events, wrapped in cosy furs in the winter and light clothing in the summer.

A woman with a thousand facets to her personality, placed in well-known settings that represented dreams within reach, interpreting the desires of any Italian woman and easily met by a trip to the department stores of Rinascente.

The figures are never static, they are always busy in small gestures that emphasise the product being advertised, highlighting a particularly meaningful moment of use.

As an alternative to the female figure, there are cute little cartoon animals in a series of different sketches with an ironic tone.

The advertising copy was then perfectly suited to figurative representation, harmonious with the style of the image and over the years undergoing the same changes. While the name “Rinascente” in the 1920s was written in very elegant italics, by the 1930s it had become larger, heavier and was often in block letters.

Between 1948 and 1956, when the department store was being rebuilt after the war, Dudovich produced his last, still beautiful, posters, when these artistic adverts were starting to make way for new advertising graphics.

This is when he created the poster announcing the reopening of the Neapolitan store, with a painting of Pulcinella holding a scale model of the new building, or a triumphant blue and yellow flag with the new lR logo announcing the inauguration of the new Milan store in 1950.