Slides of runway show(s) by Di Sant'Angelo, spring/summer 1989., 1989

Giorgio Di Sant’Angelo (b Florence, May 5, 1933; d New York, Aug 29, 1989).



American fashion and accessories designer of Italian birth. Sant’ Angelo burst onto the fashion scene in the late 1960s with his brightly-colored accessories, unconventional styling, cultural and historical references and a novel approach to dressing. Firmly believing stretch fabrics were the future, Sant’ Angelo eschewed zippers and exalted the female form through wrapping, draping and layering.



Sant’ Angelo’s formative years, spent on his grandparents’ Argentinean ranch, nurtured his appreciation of nature, music, color and costume. His actual birth name is unknown, as he referred to himself on different occasions as Jorge Alberto Imperatrice and Count Giorgio Alberto Imperatrice di Sant’ Angelo. Consequently, details of his past are often unclear, but he evidently spent two years studying law at Sante Fe’s Universidad Nacional de Litoral before entering the architecture and industrial design program at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. During this time, Sant’ Angelo was also enrolled in various private painting, sculpture, drawing and ceramic courses and success with the latter led to a six month scholarship studying art with Pablo Picasso in Vallauris. Through Picasso, he learnt to trust his restless creativity and in 1962, after winning a European animated short film competition, Sant’ Angelo arrived at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, CA. He was there on a one year study program but lasted only fifteen days. Appalled at the assembly line ethic imposed on the artistic process, he left Hollywood for Europe, but stopped en route in New York City. He recalled arriving during the revolutionary 1960s when the hippie movement was gaining momentum. Determined to be a part of it, Sant’ Angelo found employment designing textiles for Cohn-Hall-Marx and Marcus Brothers before planning interiors and designing furniture for a chain of hotels in the Bahamas. At the time he relied primarily on DuPont plastics, as they held up against the salt-laden air, but Sant’ Angelo recognized the material’s potential beyond interiors and in his spare time began creating colorful accessories from the samples and scraps. In 1966, he collaborated with German-born designer Ingeborg Markus to design a line of plastic treasures they dubbed ‘ArchitectJewels’. When the Lucite accessories were later presented to the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, she was so impressed that she demanded more.



Sant’ Angelo began to freelance his talents and in no time his designs, for feather-light jewelry, such as leather-covered Styrofoam and plastics impregnated with small stones and pearls, were gracing the pages of Vogue. Fingers of gloves were squared off and decorated with chunky non-irritating industrial zippers, silk ropes were twisted around wrists, waists and necks, while brightly colored Dynel, cork and Lucite hairpieces topped the heads of such models as Veruschka, Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. As legend has it, Vreeland realized Sant’ Angelo could do virtually anything and swiftly appointed him her muse, ordering him to inspire the magazine’s pages. As such, by and large the ephemeral effects Sant’ Angelo created for Vogue were not for sale. For instance, when Vreeland sent Sant’ Angelo, the model Veruschka and photographer Franco Rubartelli into the Arizona desert in the summer of 1968, they were not actually there to sell clothing. Yet, armed with nothing but scissors, wire and two suitcases of fabric, Sant’ Angelo proceeded to wrap, drape and tie a collection of unconventional clothing.



Although he envisioned women as seductively swathed, sumptuous gypsies who built their wardrobes around layers of colored and printed fabrics, simply changing looks with ropes, scarves and chains, he also knew the world was not ready for his avant-garde ideas of body coverings. Sant’ Angelo therefore settled for designing ready-to-wear that was stitched together rather than wrapped and presented his first spring collection in a nine-page fashion editorial in the March 1969 issue of Life magazine. The uninhibited and unexpected designs encouraged women to live out their pastoral fantasies and for the next three years, Sant’ Angelo continued to regale the fashion establishment with rich peasant, romantic gypsy and radical South and North American Indian-inspired collections ( see fig. ). At the heart of every Sant’ Angelo collection was the bodysuit and in the early 1970s he became the champion of stretch fabrics. He sought to free women from the box with the zipper in the back, believing the body should dictate the silhouette, not the clothes. Consequently, his sensual second-skin designs were often criticized for exposing too much, or for only flattering fantastic figures. But Sant’ Angelo loved women’s shapes and maintained that through his use of materials, shapes and color combinations he glorified the female form, regardless of size.



However, as America’s economy began to sag in the mid-1970s so did Sant’ Angelo’s commercial appeal. He tried new ventures but eventually settled uncomfortably on Seventh Avenue, signing licensing agreements for furs, menswear, childrenswear, swimwear and home furnishings. By the end of the decade Sant’ Angelo, dissatisfied with the quality of his mass-produced lines, tried to end these various agreements. The legalities were near-crippling and it took years for Sant’ Angelo to recover and rejuvenate. Then in 1987, without any financial backers and only himself to answer to, Sant’ Angelo’s star began to rise anew—once again his ideas were in tune with the time. Two years later he was back on top, his fall collection considered by retailers and the press as one of his finest. The clothes were still signature Sant’ Angelo—sinuous, sexy, draped and layered—only now the world had caught up with his advanced view on body coverings. Unfortunately, undermining Sant’ Angelo’s re-emergence was a battle with lung cancer and four months following his sensational fall collection, Sant’ Angelo died at the age of 56. Sant’ Angelo’s life of extravagant experimentation, as well as his predilection for wrapping and layering, body dressing and ethnic influences, have impacted modern designers, inspired new approaches to dress and forever expanded the lexicon of fashion.

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