Illustration is in vogue

Having transformed their factory into the department store Alle Città d’Italia, the Bocconi brothers started to regularly publish mail order catalogues, filled with beautiful illustrations. The most important issues were the ‘Album delle Novità’, the so-called ‘Latest product albums’, which were released just before the Spring-Summer and Autumn-Winter seasons to promote the new collections. The other editions were special catalogues devoted to linens, Christmas gifts and other specific product lines.

The Milan catalogues were also sent to customers outside the city, and later throughout Italy. They were intended to promote products that could be found in stores, and particularly to allow for mail order purchases to be made, in order to increase sales. The catalogues used the same formula as the stores – lots of items were shown, creating the same sense of opulence and visual theatricality that customers enjoyed when entering the department store, encouraging them to buy their wares.

The illustrations became an integral part of each page, with carefully-studied layouts for a clever interplay of text and pictures – illustrations took centre stage, gradually becoming bigger and bigger to take up all the available space.

During the 1880s, the catalogues were adorned with pictures, reducing written text to a mere description of the item, becoming illustrated throughout to increasingly resemble fashion magazines. Similarly, the inside pages were in black and white, while the covers started to feature colour illustrations.

During the 1880s, the settings became increasingly more detailed. The plates were more freely incorporated, but within a very precise context.

The setting was typically middle-class: family life, parties, walks and living room conversations all provided the background context to outfits recommended for such events, acting as pieces of advice on the ways and occasions they could be worn. Everything was characterised by a slight realism, which was a little fairytale-esque, suitable for representing a charming middle-class world that customers could imagine themselves in.

The catalogues illustrated menswear and childrens’ wear with the same careful attention to detail.

Both the cover and inside illustrations were signed by the artist, a sign of the growing importance of fashion illustration that now had need for professionals. The drawings, however, were not personalised – they adhered to a similar tradition of style and iconography, preventing any individual creativity or the expression of personal style.

The last publications of the Bocconi Brothers, in the early twentieth century, were little different from those of the previous century, despite a greater freedom in the drawing and page layout, and greater expressivity of the plates that began to feature the personal touches of their artists. The silhouettes also began to change, in line with the fashion trends, becoming slimmer and more slender.

The number of catalogues increased notably. The main issues were the biannual catalogues that preceded the winter and summer seasons. They featured all the new season’s Rinascente collections, from clothes and accessories to toys and tableware. The catalogues also had supplements that were published at different points in the season. The quarterly and bimonthly issues were dedicated to a specific theme – the latest products, seasonal sales, beach and country items, and special sales.

The Rinascente catalogues and brochures maintained the same layout as those of the Bocconi brothers, with pages showing the individual items alternating with pages featuring fashion plates, with almost full-page illustrations alternating with short descriptive texts in a carefully arranged design.

Some covers were in colour, characterised by very bright hues that echoed the fashion drawings of George Lepape or Sonia Delaunay, with flat backgrounds that emphasised the two-dimensionality of the fashion plates and the abstract backgrounds, which were increasingly geometric and unrealistic.

At the end of the decade, the fashion plates began again to be put in more realistic settings, and regained greater shape and physical three-dimensionalism, heralding the trend of the next decade.

In the Thirties, the androgynous female figure was left behind in favour of a curvier woman, a result of the major anti-thinness campaign. The illustrations in Rinascente catalogues, in line with the latest trends, presented very different silhouettes – the excessively tall and flat models of the last decade were set aside and robust models took their place, with a style that practically trivialised the typical shapes of the reigning aesthetics.

From the mid-Thirties, in keeping with the general revival of designs that showed fashion more realistically, Rinascente catalogues established a new realistic and playful illustrative style, with more pictorial and precise features, moving away from the two-dimensionality of the previous decade for good.

The star of these illustrations was a very feminine silhouette, well-portrayed by Gino Boccasile with his famous ‘Signorina grandi firme’ (‘Miss Designer Brand’). The artist created not only posters for Rinascente, but also some drawings for the catalogues, like those published in the monthly brochure ‘Rinascente. Novità primaverili’ (‘Rinascente. Spring news’ of 15 March 1937.

The need to document fashion as realistically as possible was met entirely by photography, which began to play an increasingly important role both in fashion magazines and the Rinascente catalogues where, from 1936, the first photos began to appear alongside illustrations, in perfect harmony.

In the post-Second World War period, illustrations were almost completely replaced by photographs, including in the Rinascente fashion catalogues, deemed more suitable for showing customers the outfits on sale at the department store.