The Foundation has secured in Bologna the corporate archive belonging to a well-known textile company of Milan, contended by many international buyers. Named after its former owner, the Renzo Brandone Fund is made up of 30.000 textile drawings that range from the mid-nineteenth to the twentieth century (including pieces on paper and fabric and wallpapers) and over 5.000 sample books purchased as source of inspiration for creative talents, among which a large Japanese corpus and many rare editions.
The fund contain an endless number of beautiful designs, testimony the best Italian and foreign designers production for the most important fashion brands (Aspesi, Iceberg, La Perla, Les Copains, Loewe, Max Mara, Moschino, Prada, Ralph Lauren and Versace). But the numerical impressiveness of the material also reflect the intact memory of the multi-year activity of the textile company, begun in the mid-1970s and ended in 2013, and testimony the activity of a part of the Made in Italy fashion chain. In fact, in the acquisition, it has been decided to keep the engraved books, from which it is possible to deduce the name of the print shop, the final customer, the chosen point colours, the height and the compositional print scheme of the fabric; the boxes with the test cards; the color variants from which you can understand which fabric and how many pieces were printed and some administrative-accounting documents, which clarify the times, the producers and the clients.
The entire original material is stored in the Foundation within two caveau specially designed to preserve it at controlled temperature and humidity, according to international parameters. Thanks to the technical support of the software house Promemoria, a digital catalog can be consulted at the Foundation’s headquarters through a functional front end. Cataloging, as conceived, wants to photograph and account the whole company and its production process, therefore the sheet has been designed to describe materials in the most complete and punctual way. While considering demanding ministerial standards, it allows an easy consultation thanks to a descriptive system ranging from general to particular: 51 macro-areas divided into 567 linked subcategories, in turn divided into specific areas.
For these reasons the heritage of textile design that FRI makes available to style departments and creative talents will not be the only gift: in its entirety, the Renzo Brandone Fund makes it possible to measure the extent of changes in the fashion and textile design manufacturing sector.