The other Capri: keeping it rough at the Jacquemus fashion show

The meeting point between Villa Malaparte and Jacquemus is both the brand’s founding and the long history of artists’ fascination with the villa, its aesthetic, and its secretiveness

Jacquemus, the fashion show on Capri: in the temple of secrecy Villa Malaparte

The Jacquemus défilé is an exception to the “no-visitors-allowed” rule of Villa Malaparte – and an exception with a story. Simon Porte Jacquemus created his brand after watching the 1963 film Le Mépris (Contempt) by French and Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard. The film was based on Il disprezzo, a 1954 Italian novel by Alberto Moravia. This French New Wave film, starring Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, and Jack Palance as Jeremiah Prokosch, was set in Italy between Rome and Capri. Many of the movie’s most known scenes took place in Villa Malaparte, including the staircase scene where Piccolo and Bardot, clad in a yellow robe, descend the house’s external staircase to reach a nearby cliff.  

The Jacquemus fashion show is an occasion for those in attendance to visit this villa of mystery

Almost thirty years later, the German fashion photographer and designer Karl Lagerfeld allowed the public to take a peek beyond the villas’ facade through his 1997 Polaroid series, which was later published in book form by the Göttingen-based German publisher Steidl in 1998. 

After a couple of perfume ads, with Kate Moss for YSL and Emma Stone for Louis Vuitton, another chance for a peek came in the summer of 2020 when London’s Gagosian Gallery in Mayfair hosted the art show titled “Casa Malaparte: Furniture,” which featured the furniture designed by Curzio Malaparte for the titular villa. 

Chances are that the Jacquemus fashion show is a once-in-a-lifetime occasion for those in attendance to visit this villa of mystery. This location fits well with the French brand, known for its predilection for minimalism, asymmetrical lines, and surrealistic touches. 

Capri: more roughness, less dolce vita 

This aesthetic parallelism between the brand and the show’s location offers a chance to witness a different interpretation of the island’s aesthetic than the one given by Italian Brand Dolce & Gabbana in May this year in its capsule created in collaboration with luxury e-commerce platform Mytheresa. The Dolce & Gabbana Capri collection had all the classic souvenir-like visual elements one could expect from a D&G thematic capsule of this kind. Jacquemus went for a rougher take on the same theme: more monasticism, less “Dolce vita” for this fashion show. 

Capri’s Villa Malaparte: roughness and mystery 

The house’s exterior, made of Pompian-red bricks, merges itself with the rocks and shrubs surrounding it while it stands out stark against the blue waters of the Gulf in its monastic-like simplicity. Built between the spring of 1938 and the summer of 1942, it includes elements of Neoclassical, Organic, and Modernist architecture, and it is considered an example of Rationalist architecture (Architettura razionale), an architectural style that emerged during the darkest period of Italian contemporary history, the Fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini.    

The two main protagonists of this villas’ story are Curzio Malaparte, the pen name of Curt Erich Sucker, an Italian-German writer, and the Trentian architect Adalberto Libera. Malaparte had been exiled by the Fascist party of which he used to be a member, to the island of Lipari, located off the northern coast of Sicily. After his exile, he picked another island as his place of residence: Capri. 

Libera was the architect hired to work on Malaparte’s new Capri house. He was part of Group 7 (Gruppo 7), a group of Italian architects who translated Modernist architecture into what would become Rationalist architecture. Examples of this architectural style are the works that Milanese architect and urbanist Piero Bottoni carried out in his native Milan, like Palazzo INA in Corso Sempione 33.  

While this building by Bottoni is known for its colorful, tiled entrance, Villa Malaparte’s roughness, incarnated by its shape and texture, is its calling card. The building as a whole follows the shape of its triangular external roof ladder, which ends in a solarium, making Villa Malaparte reminiscent of a Greek Amphitheatre.    

What is Capri? – Islands as objects of myths and projections 

Much of this villa charm, which is still alive and kicking to these days almost a hundred years later, comes from the question of who we are to consider its father. The relationship between its architect and its owner was riddled with conflict, and to Malaparte, his villa was more than a house. He said, «The day I started building a house, I didn’t think I would draw a portrait of myself».

If, to Curzio Malaparte, his house was more of a rough self-portrait of stone, a symbol, and metaphor of his persona, his “casa come me” (home like me), the same can be said about its location given his experience with confinement on another island. The writer was not the first mainlander to set his sights on the island, which was picked by the Roman emperor Tiberius (42 BC-AD 37) as its residence, as testified by his palace, Villa Jovis. Centuries later, in the 19th and the 20th centuries, a plethora of artists, intellectuals, and political dissidents from Northern and Eastern Europe flocked to Capri, charmed by the fantasy of a pastoral lifestyle carried out against the backdrop of the rough, untamed nature of the island, seen a place far from the worries and pace of the modern world. 

Italian essayist Lea Vergine (1936 – 2020) put in these terms: «The island was not only the exhausted féerie of Victorian dissidents, D’Annunzio aesthetes, wealthy unemployed people, supreme amateurs, nor the stage for many to meet and say goodbye; rather the magnetic pole, the point of confluence, the obligatory stop, the geometric place of friendships and farewells of the most disparate destinies, the cornerstone around which a large part of culture and politics revolved from 1905 to 1935».

The idea of the island as a rough utopia away from the spleen of modern living

The concepts of islands and utopia seem destined to be tied together in the Western imagination, from Thomas More’s (1478–1535) nova insula Utopia to James Matthew Barrie’s (1860 – 1937) “Never Land.” The idea of the island as a rough utopia away from the spleen of modern living is a dream divorced from the roughness of the reality of living on an island, a microcosm whose rules and rhythms are hard to discern for outsiders. 

Yet, it is a dream that has accompanied humankind for millennia. In her 2016 novel “Island” (Ø), the Faroese-Danish author Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen reflected on the relationship between humanity and islands, both real and imaginary ones: «Everywhere, always, men had dreamed of floating islands, had found them or built them. History was constellated by a myriad of geological migrations and mythological, literary, and technological islands. An entire fleet». 

La Casa – the Jacquemus Capri show

Jacquemus’ collection matched the aesthetic of its location. The Capri show was rich in clean lines, nude and see-through looks, with a minimal palette that matched the Mediterranean one of the Gulf of Naples, which functioned as the show’s background.

Italian and foreign artists, such as Italian singers Ghali and Elodie and English and Albanian pop star Dua Lipa, came to the island to attend the défilé. During the show, KPOP idol Jennie Kim from BLACKPINK made her runway debut in a crew-neck little black dress.

Roberta Fabbrocino