Colour is always at the heart of the Lisa Corti collections and for Spring Summer 2020 the Milanese designer wants to give us a feel for her personal ideas and reflections on colours. This is her way of interpreting nature and everything that surrounds us, making it tangible and turning it into a Home & Garment Collection for everyday use which sets us dreaming about faraway lands, a collection which is at the same time up to the minute and utterly timeless.
P.Rew.: Lisa Corti
The fabrics created for this new collection are the result of a careful study of colour and the observation of how it appears in nature. Here the edges are blurred and all that the human eye manages to perceive is areas of different shades: it is harmony and the proportion between colours that allows us to visualise beauty as a whole.
Goethe, in his Theory of Colour, described colours as formal categories which the mind elaborates in order to make our vision of the world conform to our own inner order. This also occurs in the modus operandi of Lisa Corti: colour is used as a means of making thought perceptible and acts in the world through it with a view to making our relationship with our environment more harmonious.
With customary attention to detail, the shades used by Lisa Corti were specially created in Jaipur by master craftsmen in the art of dyeing, then each and every one classified and coded with a specific name to define it.
As always, India is a source of inspiration and in this spring – summer collection, the colours are fresh and saturated, like the colours of tropical fruit, together with some surprising juxtapositions.
The lines in the garment collection are deliberately clean and the kaftan is the model Lisa Corti favours most, a timeless, versatile garment which is never dated, where the entire focus is on the colour.
In the gauzy organzas of the Gulab and Big Flower designs, viridian green is warmed by papaya red and orange. The Ololay design is applied on the silks hand-printed in three colour variations: purple, a rich, saturated colour like a cardinal’s robes, green-gold, typical of certain spices found in the markets of Bombay, and celadon, that aquamarine hue used alongside Magenta to weave the most exquisite brocades in Varanasi.
There is also plenty of inspiration from nearer to home such as in the print Damask Decò where we find the cool enamel colours of Lisbon pottery or the majolica floor tiles of Noto, Mediterranean hues with a hint of acid green which give it a touch of Arabia.
Surprisingly, the Home collection places the accent on white: a colour that is a non-colour, which until now has never featured in Lisa Corti collections, an oversight remedied here, and which now has the upper hand as it becomes light.
A white which is no longer seen as an absence of colour, but which rather is conceived as light, the fundamental condition for perceiving all the hues and shades which surround it.
This is how in the Leopard Flower and Japanese White designs, the colours, freed from the nuances of light/dark are vibrant and naked, revealing their very essence.
The new design is Peonia, the peony so beloved of Lisa Corti, which is given a pop art twist with its flamboyant colours and used as the frame for a soft tone on tone Tibetan inspired pattern.
