PINO LANCETTI

Pino Lancetti was born in Perugia Italy in 1932 .

Lancetti Collection shown  in Rome..

Pino Lancetti with Elsa Martinelli.



Lancetti -Italian Vogue.

Pino Lancetti began his artistic career as a painter and decorator of ceramics.

After completing studies at the Academy of Art in Perugia- he moved to Rome in 1954 where he opened his first atelier in Via Margutta- close to the Via Condotti.

His international success came at the end of the 60's when he launched clothes made of printed fabrics inspired by Chagall, Kandinsky,Klimt, Matisse and Picasso.

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Vintage Lancetti ..

Sable Coat by Lancetti

 Lancetti with Annie Giardot - French actress.

Many famous women were dressed by the House of Lancetti.

Audrey Hepburn.

Annie Giardot

Princess Salimah Agha Khan.

Princess Soraya.

Princess Paola (now Queen ) of Belgium.

Among his famous clients were Ginger Rogers, Audrey Hepburn ,Annie Giradot, Princess Salimah Aga Khan, Princess Soraya ,Princess Paola (now Queen) of Belgium and Sylvana Mangano.

Lancetti and his sisters Vanda, Lorena and Edda.

He also designed bags, sunglasses and shoes and his perfume was always very popular in Italy.




Postage stamp from Nicaragua.

Lancetti was a real artist .He designed his fabrics like a painter .In the 70's days fabric houses in Italy would work with the top designers.The would supply all the fabric the designer wanted for their collections in return the mills would sell the fabric designs as "Lancetti for Etro".

Lake Como

 

In he 70"s Italy was the biggest manufacturer of silk fabrics in the world- especially prints.

The waters of Lake Como near Milan was ideal for silk and most of the fabrics were made in that area.

 

Paintings by Pino Lancetti.

 

He was a very shy and introverted man that lived for his art .

In 1999 he decided to retire from the fashion world and sell his company to a business group in Turin to pursue his original passion :-painting.

In 2000  he had his last fashion show at the Cloister of Bramante in Rome .

He also received the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

 He  died in Rome in 2007 when he was 75 years old.

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Obituary; THE GUARDIAN  March 29 2007

Pino Lancetti, who has died aged 78, began his career in high Roman fashion in the 1950s, when it was designed by artists, made by craftspeople and worn by a minute coterie of the grand; by the time he departed from couture in 2001, his name was a brand and fashion was a major Italian export industry.

Lancetti's first and last interest was painting; he was called the artist couturier. He was born in the Perugian town of Gualdo Tadino, famous for its ceramics, and intended to work in that business after studying at the art institute in the city of Perugia. But as a student he also had a quiet and serious gift for clothes, which he used when he moved to Rome in 1954. He set up a small atelier, sold freelance sketches to the salons of the Fontana sisters and Contessa Simonetti Visconti, and designed for the house of Carosa.Lancetti opened a salon in Rome in 1961. He put on a collection in the Pitti palace in Florence, with the enthusiastic endorsement of senior fashion editor Irene Brin and the director of Rome's Modern Art Gallery, Palma Bucarelli. Then, for more than a decade, he joined Fabiani, Capucci, Mila Schon and Valentino in the Rome shows. He stopped showing regularly as the alta moda season disintegrated in the 1970s - and later admitted, of the catwalk shows of the 1990s, that the cost and melodrama of supermodel display were not always balanced by income from sales.

Lancetti designed memorable textiles based on the paintings of major artists (his own favourites were Kandinsky, Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse and the designer-abstract painter Sonia Delaunay); with them, he temporarily challenged, in the 1960s, Emilio Pucci's dominance of Italian prints. His work was especially venerated in Japan.

Art influenced his cut and construction, too - themes from great gallery shows, which he visited repeatedly, turned up in his work to the end of his career. He also borrowed from oriental and folk decoration, and from movies. He adored Piero Tosi's designs for Luchino Visconti's 1963 costume drama, The Leopard, and himself worked a little for cinema, producing dresses for Joan Collins in La Congiuntura (1965).

Lancetti recalled that the original clientele for his Via Condotti premises was limited to about 300 customers, among them Princess Soraya, Queen Paola of Belgium, Salima Aga Khan and the Italian film divinities Silvana Mangano (obituary, December 18 1989) and Monica Vitti, who all arrived via personal introduction and were happy to pay high prices for skilled worksmanship, especially beading, on one-off evening gowns. "I was head of a handicraft company," he recalled.

When he realised in 1963 that women wanted fewer formal clothes, Lancetti "put away the crinolines" and produced a successful collection based on military details, albeit rendered in supersoft stuffs and leathers. He never did take to the subsequent era of T-shirt and jeans, and preferred to forget that his goddess Mangano had launched her screen career wearing near-rags with élan. He was not approving of extreme youth, either. Girls lacked elegance.

Lancetti restructured his company in the 1990s; those golden hands responsible for craftwork were getting harder to find and keep in Italy. He made licensing deals and set up new labels for, among other items, cashmere knits and bridal dresses. The Alta Moda gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2000, and he presented a final collection, elegant as ever, before selling his name and company to a Tuscan industrialist, Ugo Paci, who briefly, between 2003 and 2005, brought in the brilliant  Brazilian Icarius de Menezes as creative director. His prints were almost up to the master's standard, although the master was by then painting quietly in retirement.

Lancetti is survived by his sisters, Edda, Nanda and Lorena.

 Pino Lancetti, fashion designer and artist, born November 27 1928; died March 7 2007