Alfonso Umali
Florence, a city with an incalculable heritage of painting, sculpture and architecture, the cradle of the Renaissance, is the birthplace of the fashion house founded by Salvatore Ferragamo in 1927, from which the giant takes its name. And this year, in the new autumn-winter collection, the Uffizi Galleries welcomes a couturier signed by Ferragamo, who for this occasion combines fashion and Renaissance art.
The campaign entitled “New Renaissance”, under the direction of creative director Maximilian Davis, was entrusted to the young American photographer Tyler Mitchell, who decided to depict the models, surrounding them in an unusual setting: the one offered by nature, nature and landscapes represented in some of the most important works of Italian painting 15th and 16th centuries.
In fact, for the unusual (and beautiful) countryside, the photographer used some of the Florentine museum’s greatest masterpieces as the “backdrop” of the new collection. In particular, he used a diptych of the Dukes of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, a masterpiece by Piero della Francesca, Portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici by Giorgio Vasari, Portrait of a Man with a Medal and the Annunciation of San Francisco. “Martino alla Scala” by Sandro Botticelli, “Allegory” by Giovanni Bellini, “The Annunciation” by Alesso Baldovinetti and again by Veronese.
The photographer wants to capture a linear and homogeneous dialogue – encapsulated in a single frame – between art and fashion, between the divine and the earthly, creating a deep connection that harmonizes various garments and, therefore, a change in modern aesthetics from the painting “Immortals” of the great masters of the Renaissance. The house’s creative director, Maximilian Davis (also very young, born in 1995), explains that “The Renaissance has its roots in Florence, and Florence has its roots in Ferragamo. In this new era of the House, it was natural to recognize the emblematic city of the Renaissance as its spiritual home, drawing on its genius and artistic talent to convey the aesthetics of the new collection.”
Ferragamo’s connection with Florence has always been very strong: Salvatore Ferragamo, born in Bonito, in the province of Avellino, Campania, the eleventh of fourteen children, began his career at the tender age of 12, and then moved to the United States at the age of just 16 to realize your dream to leave a mark in fashion. This dream would then take him (and this would be his “first Renaissance”) to the Hollywood Boulevard area, where he would open a store full of decorations, from tapestries to hand-carved wooden furniture and real classical columns that referenced the style of the Renaissance. The Italian company Quattrocento creates shoes for Hollywood actors that will taste like real works of art. But, always fascinated by Florence – as a symbol of art, architecture and culture of the Renaissance – he moved there in 1927 and founded his own company there. Some of the big stars who will be wearing Ferragamo designer shoes include Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, Eva Peron, Sophia Loren, just to name a few.
Today, Ferragamo once again focuses its image on art. And if he chooses Florence and the Renaissance as historical references, then the choice of such a young photographer and director as Tyler Mitchell is also of great importance.
Who is the real Tyler Mitchell? Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1995, in what he called a “small-town context”: “I come from the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, which means my childhood was filled with nature and lush green spaces,” recalled he’s in an interview. “I am an only child, with a thoughtful and reflective nature, and in the summer after leaving school I enjoyed going to summer camp, where I enjoyed simple and commonplace pleasures, if you will, like lying on the grass with friends.”
Who is one of the youngest and most sought-after photographers, artists and directors in the world today, develops a passion for photography from an early age. Self-taught, equipped only with a Canon camera, he learned editing techniques on Youtube to create videos. skateboarding, a passion that he shares with many children of his generation and that brings him closer to those whom he still considers his best friends. The first photographs focus primarily on African American boys, taken in everyday contexts, with an emphasis on the latter’s relationship with American society, especially that of the southern United States. Moving to New York, he would enroll in film and television studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where his renaissance would take place.
In 2015, he decides to travel for a month to Havana, Cuba, where he will capture the everyday reality of the island (which he discovers to be “a wonderfully vibrant but tragically degraded place”), with its characteristic architecture still preserved in its colonial style. taste and reality metro local, with youth skateboard culture. The result would be the publication of his first book (at the tender age of 20) entitled El Paquete.
The sequel represents a series of successes achieved by rediscovering and working on what would soon become an unmistakable style of black identity, photographing young African Americans in situations of great freedom, carefreeness and an almost magical, fairy-tale atmosphere. “I experienced an evolution when I made videos as a child skateboarding from a point of view essentially focused on the sports and style aspects, – Tyler will again tell in the interview, – then I began to look at all the autobiographical ideas about Black and the identity of black women and men in my community.”
In 2018, he will rewrite history by becoming not only the youngest boy ever to appear on the cover of Vogue magazine, but also the first African-American boy to do so. In fact, for the September issue of the same year, Mitchell photographed singer Beyoncé (absolutely successful and defined by many as the undisputed Queen of Pop, with over 17 billion views on the Youtube platform alone). The portrait will then be displayed in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. His first solo exhibition will be held at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam next year, entitled “I Can Make You Feel Good.” Later, he would also collaborate with companies such as Marc Jacobs, Converse and Nike, Prada, Gucci and many other brands. In November 2020, again for Vogue, he will photograph singer Harry Styles, a former member of the famous English group One Direction, in a Gucci suit, immortalized in the expanses of grass. Mitchell’s goal is to liberate African-American culture by capturing its beauty and deepest identity. “Very often I encountered sultry, young, attractive white models running around freely and having a blast – so did Larry Clark and Ryan McGinley. I rarely saw the same thing in images of black people—or at least in the photographs I knew then.” His photography is, on the one hand, unusually dreamlike and seeks simple, unconstructive, almost heavenly situations (perhaps a memory of his youth in Georgia, between days spent doing nothing in the parks), and on the other hand, always very attentive to issues of civil rights and black identity. “There needs to be a lot of pressure to get more black and brown people in front of the camera,” said the young photographer. It is no coincidence that even today in the Ferragamo advertising campaign the models chosen by Tyler Mitchell belong to a variety of ethnic groups. A new multi-ethnic renaissance, and not only white.