Using the most advanced technical procedures that the textile industry has to offer, Nanni Strada engineered a vibrant fabric that reacts to light. Out of this she constructed a religious garment that expresses the immateriality of sacredness. Strada spoke to Domus about the project’s background. Photography by Francesco Radino. Edited by Francesca Picchi.

Ritual garments
The invitation to rethink the “casula”, a ritual garment worn during religious ceremonies, provided a chance to take to the extreme an approach that I have unconsciously used in all my designs. It involves using the tools of industrial production and in particular operations connected to making textiles as a sort of poetic language.The casula is actually a ritual garment. The name comes from casupola, or capanna (shelter or hut), because the monks, being without a church or a home, travelled wearing only the cloak in which they slept, lived and prayed. The casula helped to protect them.
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I have always been struck by the strict codes that regulate every single moment of the liturgical celebration. Each element deeply fascinated me for its immaterial value. Rather than working on the symbolic nature of the colours, I preferred to concentrate on the amount of light reflection. In this way I was able to work on the brilliantness and vibration of light. Gold has been used a great deal in sacred garments, but it is a metal that needs to be woven into the fabric. However, in modern times we see the use of a metallic yarn called Lurex. It is very shiny and used a lot in haute couture to decorate evening wear, producing results that are both sophisticated and vulgar. My idea was to “laminate” the surface of the material in order to obtain an effect that is shiny and more metallic.

Fabric as a mutant surface
Surface treatment is something that has always excited me. A while back I was in contact with Limonta, a leading company in this area. Fabric produced manually or industrially assumes its textural effect in the treatment process. In this phase anything can happen – straw mats can be transformed into soft cashmere with teaselling, the surface of a fabric can be changed by brushing with teasels. Complex treatments exist for flocking, resining, coagulation. It is possible to alter the fabric’s surface and give it the qualities of other materials (paper, plastic, metals) and/or transform it into a mutant material, creating a kind of process of crossbreeding. In the process of coupling, textile “leaves” or different materials are joined together. This fusion occurs by calendaring, passing the fabrics through cylinders that whirl round as well as altering the brightness simply by calibrating the number of passages and the speed of the cylinders.
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I have been working for some time on crossbreeding different elements and what I consider to be “the elegance of the hybrid”. Today I want to bring together different worlds at the design phase because that is what interests me the most. An analogy with music When I started imagining this garment, it was quite natural to use music as a reference. I thought about what goes on when you listen to a concert in a church. In this space made up of light and shadow as well as changes in sound, it is all about a resonance, a vibration, a relationship with distance. For example, the choir is often placed behind the altar to create a fracture, a separation from those listening. I don’t know to what extent this influenced me unconsciously when I began thinking about this garment. The different degrees of brilliance, levels of luminosity and the different perception linked to the vibration of the light are all important components of this design.

The composition of the garment
This garment is made in two layers; two garments are superimposed on one another quite freely. In the beginning the outer garment was supposed to have more texture. My idea was to use a cheap material like felt or wool that had some weight to it. However, this didn’t fit the needs of the prelates, who prefer lightweight garments that allow a certain fluidity of movement. The outer garment was therefore made from a simple silk material that flowed much better. The colour white was chosen because it represents the liturgy for the whole year. The internal garment is linked to the colours of the liturgical calendar which are gold, green, red, purple and – for the Ambrosian ritual – rose.

Décor
I had seen a fabric made with laser cutting with vertical elements that instinctively made me think of a gothic pattern. I liked the idea that these cuts revealed slightly, almost imperceptibly, the brilliance of the garment underneath. I wanted this effect to be emphasised with movement so as to follow the gestures of the person carrying out the ceremony, as if the garment beneath, emanating this special brilliance, is a hidden soul that has just been revealed.
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The pattern of cuts was made on the computer at regular intervals. Then I started to take out, move, shorten and lengthen the cuts. The design looks uniform but in reality contains imperceptible variations that give it grace and delicacy.
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In the laminating phase of the inner garment we worked on the levels of brilliance so as to obtain a vibrant material that reacted to light. This research was very hard for a producer who wasn’t used to following the requests of a designer. Making a shiny fabric and asking then to lessen the brightness, passing it through the machine another time to obtain a more subdued effect, all this wasn’t easy. What I was looking for in the uncertainty of these steps involving pressure, calendaring, vaporising and heat treatment was to achieve a kind of deadened brightness that transcended the reality of the material itself.

Generating Geometries
I don’t know how to explain my rejection of everything sartorial, be it the hand stitching, the “made-to-measure”, the knitting, the crochet, the tight fitting clothes. Mine was and is a rejection of the object as an expression of a culture in which the garment is constructed on anatomical forms of a “dressed” mannequin-body that everyone has to adapt to. The first clean break with this tradition was to reject tailoring and the kind of clothing that is an imprint of an invented body. I responded with geometry, with a flat look that was taken from observing other cultures, particularly the Far East. At the end of the 1960s this approach was quite new and something of a breakthrough since it upset the status quo.

Painting with machines
Going to a factory has always filled me with a strong emotion. I watch giant machines where fabric enters and then a completely different one comes out the other end. Watching these processes over and over makes me think about the expressive possibilities of mechanical production.
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Starting with the first 1970s designs, where the garment was produced entirely by machine, I have been excited by the idea of being able to introduce a kind of aesthetic, be it tangible or immaterial, into these processes. In the end the most important things that I have done are linked to the unconventional use of these machines. For me, it is a bit like trying to “paint with machines”.
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The idea of seeking a poetic language, a form of lyrical expression linked to immateriality through textile and industrial processes, also characterises this project. For example, my “Torchons” collection – travel garments and crumpled pieces that I presented in 1986 – was the result of an error that wound up being transformed into something quite beautiful. It is a moment of grace when you manage to see in a path that is prefixed or taken for granted, a way out; when you see a possibility in a neglected step, this is the strength of design.

Fragments of a conversation with Nanni Strada Milan, Tuesday 5 September 2005 

Nanni Strada, dress designer, was the first to take the themes of design and industrial production onto territories consecrated by convention to fashion. After the first ethnological collection in 1973, in 1974 she designed the “cloak and the skin”, an investigation into the primary components of the design of clothing, rejecting the sartorial rules typical of fashion design and taking inspiration from studies by ethnographer, Max Tilke. In 1979 she won the Compasso d’Oro for the first garment in the world without seams. In 1986 with her travel garments “Torchons”, she began working on the compressibility of clothing and its “nomadic” use