CINZIA SAYS...

TEXT BY THOMAS ROUECHÉ

Dressing up is the first thing you do every morning: dishevelled, refined, ‘normal’. Whether we like it or not, clothes are the (always deliberate) performance of ourselves.” — Cinzia Ruggeri

Over the last decade Italian postmodern design has become inescapable. Indeed, it is hard to think of a more ubiquitous design cliché or an object more synonymous with the influencer aesthetic than Ettore Sottsass’ 1970s Ultrafragola mirror. Its undulating curves, like the other ludic, colourful and surprising characteristics of Sottsass’ design group Memphis, are what makes it fit so well in the amorphous globalised taste of the Instagram feed. It is a strange irony indeed that an object produced by a movement that sought to question and deconstruct meaning and its formation within the context of design finds itself so seamlessly woven into the contemporary language of status signification.
That these objects now regularly achieve stratospheric prices on the secondary market, moreover, means that it can be easy to forget the context from which they came, to see them as a late 20th-century version of a Biedermeier or Chippendale. Shorn from the creative, interdisciplinary chaos of 1980s Milan, we retrofit meaning onto the work of designers who sought through contrast, bricolage and playful détournements, to escape it.
The life and work of Cinzia Ruggeri, currently on show in Cinzia says… at Goldsmiths CCA and previously at MACRO in Rome, offers a fascinating portal back into the world from which these objects sprang. Ruggeri today is a somewhat obscure figure in the history of late 20th-century Italian design, not least because much of her work was as a fashion designer, which lent an ephemeral quality to many of her designs. Yet the delicate reconstruction of her aesthetic by the curatorial team resituates Ruggeri in the now – alongside current designers seeking to push back against the flattening effects of social-media algorithms, in search of design languages that convey meaning through intimacy and connection.
Born in Milan in 1942, Ruggeri started her career in the early 1960s as a painter before an 18-month internship at Carven in Paris. On her return to Milan she worked in her father’s garment business before launching her own label, Bloom, in 1972. That Bloom’s aesthetic is best communicated through her design for its headquarters is perhaps revealing. High on the walls painted Pepto-Bismol-pink, balconies jutted out into the space, modelled on Roman palazzi but turned 180 degrees. On them stood wooden maquettes of Piero della Francesca angels, looking out over a black marble floor, at the centre of which lay a “lake”, filled with living shrimp.

Ruggeri was famously uncompromising. She would turn away any customers who made their way to her store and asked her to alter her designs. She created work frenetically through the 1970s and 1980s, presenting fashion shows with all the aplomb of Schiaparelli. Her work explored the forms of the human body, while simultaneously pushing against its boundaries, reconceptualising what garments could be. Speaking of the presentation of one of her most famous dresses, Ruggeri said, “I designed this dress that I would like to call octopus dress and I would like to build a presentation around it. It has suction cups, but what are they for? To catch. Octopuses capture things, but so do piano keys.”

Such surrealism was seen in all aspects of her life. Supposedly at one of her birthday parties she greeted her guests with green cocktails in a room swathed in green tulle. The lights were turned off, and when they were reilluminated a dinner had been set that was entirely red, served with red wine; for the following course, the lights went off and the guests were provided with a fish, painted blue, served with blue wine. Eventually the party ended up all black, because Ruggeri hated her birthday.
Regular motifs appeared in her work, not least the steps of the ziggurat, which were a feature of her designs for Italian band Matia Bazar. “They had asked me to find, as they say, a new look,” she remembered. “To me it seemed wrong to simply clothe them in nice new dresses. Reductive. So I resorted to a more characterised sign, the staircase, which they could then apply to their sets, record covers […] I am fascinated by rhythms, geometries.” It would appear again and again in her work, at once ancient and modern, playing fundamentally with the straight lines modernism had bequeathed.

Cinzia Ruggeri, Stivali Italia, 1986. Photograph by Rebecca Fanuele.Courtesy Archive Cinzia Ruggeri, Milan; Campoli Presti, London, Paris

Cinzia Ruggeri, Nightgown, Autumn / Winter 1984–1985. Photograph by Alessandro Zambianchi.Courtesy Archive Cinzia Ruggeri, Milan; Galleria Federico Vavassori, Milan

The multiplicity of references and inspirations from which Ruggeri drew were perhaps best captured in the text she wrote in 1986 for the launch of her first menswear collection. “Cinzia Ruggeri’s woman is tired of being alone! Cinzio Ruggeri’s man is someone who likes changes. He has a difficult character but is wonderfully unbearable. He is not perfect, but his individuality lies in his defects. He’s inquisitive, eccentric, ironically romantic and likes to be liked by few. He is someone with whom to eat, drink and sleep. Who likes breakfast in bed. Who adores life and knows how to manipulate it. Who loves adventure, nightlife, Fabergé eggs, Pirandello’s plays, Italian gardens, matured wines and fresh ideas…”
Gradually, Ruggeri’s work began to take in more decorative objects, such as furniture and rugs. It spoke to her omnivorous approach to work. “I don’t think there are boundaries between the things around us,” she said. “I am as interested in dresses as I am in toothbrushes or pots… Where there is something that bores me, I have a desire to change it. I would like to add emotion to every object. I always wanted to be an artist, then gradually I got an urge to apply art to everything I could.”
Ruggeri’s late-1980s designs go far beyond the structural games played by the Memphis designers, while clearly evoking their sense of possibility and play. Her designs draw less on modernist or organic codes and more on an almost surrealistic reinterpretation of historical forms: a glass dining table has adjustable candle sticks built into it; a chair is transformed into a golden throne, adorned with marble eggs and the recurrent embroidered motif of fried eggs on its puce green fabric. This is a postmodernism writ large, unabashedly eclectic and consciously pushing at the meaning, function and limits of what we understand furniture – and design – to be.
In the early 1990s, Ruggeri disappeared from Milan for seven years. She moved to Puglia where she joined a community of designers and makers, and where her work shifted in tone, becoming at once more rooted in furniture design, and more surreally artistic. She collaborated with companies on a series of dramatic and playful objects that at the same time moved away from the chaotic energy of her early years. When she returned to Milan in 1998, it was as an icon. The later years of Ruggeri’s life were characterised by a virtuoso performance of art and design across disciplines, until her death in 2020.
The reframing of Ruggeri’s work in Cinzia says… (re)introduces us to this astonishing character while making a powerful case for her inclusion within a canon of Italian design that has, unfortunately, been all too easily written by those who have achieved financial success. The catalogue tells the remarkable story of an iconoclast and a rebel who at the same time embodied the genteel character of the Milanese bourgeoisie, sophisticated yet keen to shatter suppositions.
Ruggeri’s work returns a subversive power to the now-ubiquitous and flattened-out phenomenon of postmodern design, with the exhibition catalogue seeking to position her in the context of such luminaries as Demna at Balenciaga, Alessandro Michele at Gucci, or Miuccia Prada, all of whom have found a language that elegantly reframes the prevailing logic of our mediated age and brings our focus back to the emotions and textures of life. Or as Cinzia put it: “I love freedom and I hate prejudices, I just wanted to express myself and my ideas in a completely free environment in different fields – and make people smile.” ◉

Rocco, 1989. Wood, cotton velvet, bulb. Courtesy Archivio Cinzia Ruggeri, Milan Galleria Federico Vavassori, Milan

Ai Piedi Nudi a Murano, 2019. Ravenna mosaic and Venetian murrine. Courtesy private collection, Switzerland