Idyll is a short and highly subjective literary composition.
In ancient Greek it is εἰδύλλιον, diminutive of εἶδος, meaning image.
It is therefore a small picture, a sketch.
ARDUSSE is the concise and personal idyll of Gaetano Colucci, born in Naples, raised in Rome, trained at Luiss in Rome, passing through Stanford and completing his studies at Cass Business School in London with a master’s degree to finally return to Italy to express a very personal passion for fashion. In ARDUSSE, Colucci collects and transfigures personal and family experiences, friendship ties and inclinations with a lyrical and airy touch. The name is a crasis of Arcadia and Jeunesse, but also an epigram that is the manifesto of an aesthetic of kindness that builds a parallel, poetic, possible world. An Arcadia, in fact: not an escape from reality, but a filter to interpret a different reality. A hymn to youth as a condition of the gaze.
ARDUSSE’s first idyll is Spring/Summer 2021. As the founding act of a story that will unfold from here on, this first idyll reiterates and outlines the foundations of the narrative, drawing direct inspiration from the first idyll of Theocritus, the Syracusan poet who originally painted the bucolic and soothing features of Arcadia, imagining man in contact with nature.
ARDUSSE’s is a literary Arcadia of clothes indifferently designed for boys and girls, filtered through the tender and dusty colors of Watteau and Fragonard, as well as through the consciously childlike gestures, the unlearning of Cy Twombly and his young follower Roberto Maria Lino, whose Narcissus features in the form of a jacquard on a pullover. A delicate language emerges from the clash of archetypal, masculine and pragmatic shapes in enveloping volumes – the parka, the blazer, the duster coat, the anorak, the pleated trousers, the tailored Bermuda shorts, the ruffled shirt, the crocheted sweaters – and delicate, feminine fabrics, either impalpable or with intense, sensual textures. The surfaces are bare, or covered with bucolic allover prints. Occasional handwritten verses punctuate the silhouettes.
Poetic but not nostalgic, ARDUSSE ’s first idyll becomes a physical, tangible journey through the rooms of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna. The ancient verses inspire contemporary scenes, while sardonic slashes of irony bring Arcadia back from myth to reality.
