Design | Nymphenburg Part I: Top Fashion Designers Dress Up Bustelli’s 18th Century Models- Lagerfeld, Lacroix and Others

Adaline André, Anselmo, 2008. Figurine designed by Franz Anton Bustelli, 1759/60. Couture edition, limited edition of 25.

Adaline André can be considered a pioneer of the penchant for extravagant locations. Among the venues she has used is the Grand Salon of the International Conference Centre in Avenue Kléber, where the peace treaty for Vietnam was signed. She creates fashion with an unusual political dimension. Since 1997, André has been not only an official member of haute couture but also an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a title she fully lives up to. She created numerous costume designs for contemporary theatre, opera and ballet. Asked for the secret of her style, she told Time magazine: “The allure is all in the cut. What counts is the delayed reaction,” i.e. the spectator’s astonishment. That’s the final touch – shock, and the certainty that, once a Surrealist, always a Surrealist.

Damiano Biella, Donna Martina, 2008. Figure by Franz Anton Bustelli, 1759/60. Couture edition, limited edition of 25.

In 2006 Damiano Biella was appointed creative director of Ungaro. The Italian had previously been with Valentino and Carolina Herrera. Under his management, the brand is getting back into its old stride. His emphasis on feminine elegance, deliberately dispensing with exaggerated flamboyance, is quickly putting the firm back in the limelight, especially in the USA. Among his new fans are actress Naomi Watts, who wore a yellow Escada dress for the Oscars, actress Hilary Swank, and new advertising model Christy Turlington. Says Biella: “I saw incredible potential. Margaretha was incredibly inventive in her use of colour and ahead of the curve in using top models and photographers for the catalogues and creating a strong presence in the United States. She really knew her customer. The brand just needed to find that woman again.”

Igor Chapurin, Corine, 2008. Figure by Franz Anton Bustelli, 1759/60. Couture edition, limited edition of 25.

“I want to show the Russia that belongs to Chagall and Kandinsky, to make Russia famous for creativity and style, rather than caviar and vodka,” says Igor Chapurin. This sense of cultural mission is something that Chapurin brings to other arenas as well. He has done numerous theatre sets for Oleg Menshikov. In 2003 he became the first Russian fashion designer the Bolshoi Theatre ever invited to design the costumes and stage sets for the ballet.

Esteban Cortazar, Lucinda, 2008. Figure by Franz Anton Bustelli, 1759/60. Couture edition, limited edition of 25.

Esteban Cortazar is a young Paris-based Colombian who has shot to the top of the industry, and who has been appointed chief designer at Emanuel Ungaro at the age of 23. At 12 he was already decorating the shop windows of vintage clothes shops in his neighborhood, and at 13 he showed his first collection of nine designs on the runway at a talent show at South Pointe Elementary school, with classmates as models.

His father lived right above the News Café on Ocean Drive. Cortazar automatically became acquainted with VIPs, including Todd Oldham. Cortazar was only 13 when he showed his sketchbook to Oldham, who promptly invited him to one of his fashion shows in New York.

Oldham attributes the appeal of Cortazar’s designs to Florida: “He grew up seeing bare breasts on the beach every day, so that’s a different perspective than most people. His perspective is sexy but in a refreshingly unforced way, it’s very breezy, and it’s easy and it’s young.” Among his fans are singer Beyonce, Kylie Minogue and costume designer Patricia Field, who used his clothes for Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada.

Maurizio Galante, Octavio, 2008. Figure by Franz Anton Bustelli. Couture edition, limited edition of 25.

Maurizio Galante differs from most of his col­leagues in his universal approach to design, a tradition entrenched in Italy since the Renaissance. He designs lighting and furniture regularly shown at the Salone del Mobile in Milan. His chairs look as if they have donned extravagant clothes. His enthusiasm for craft skills turns his clothes into precious objects that can take up to 300 hours to make, resulting in outfits that are so artfully put together that they could easily feature as exhibition pieces. The essential aspect of his work is a love of craftsmanship: “I conceive my designs, be they haute couture pieces, a light or a vase, to convey feelings and emotions… The connection is impor­tant: between myself, the producer of the object, and the person who will see the completed object. Love is the connecting fibre. Love of the craft that is invested in the conception and making of the object.”

Christian Lacroix, Julia, 2008. Figure by Franz Anton Bustelli, 1759/60.

Alongside his work as a couturier, Christian Lacroix also designs costumes for films, theatre, opera and the ballet, as well as, since 2000, for Air France, the TGV train, and hotels. He is the president of the National Center of Stage Costumes in Moulins, where, in 2007, he exhibited his 25 years of stage designing parallel to the Lacroix fashion retrospective Histoires de Mode at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In 2008 he became the director of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, where he curated an exhibition at the Musée Reattu juxtaposing the museum’s 18th-century paintings and sketches collection with contemporary artists’ work and his own couture pieces.

Karl Lagerfeld, Corine, 2004. Figure by Franz Anton Bustelli, 1759/60.

Karl Lagerfeld, Rhinozeros, 2010. Figure by Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, ca. 1770.

Karl Lagerfeld stations along the designer’s way to the top read like the golden door plates of the most illustrious haute couture houses. In some respects, Pierre Balmain, Jean Patou, Chloé, Fendi and Chanel. His recourse to the camera, the advertising campaigns he designed, the opening of his gallery, the first collection for H&M as well as the rigorous projection of his own persona transformed the man with the white collar and black sunglasses into an icon.

The collaboration with the Nymphenburg porcelain manufactory references Lagerfeld’s work as a costume designer for institutions which include the Vienna Burgtheater, La Scala in Milan as well as the Salzburg Festival. In 2004 the fashion designer created a black and white dress with lavish gold accents for the handmade Corine figurine. The dainty rococo lady, designed by Franz Anton Bustelli in 1759/60 as part of his Commedia dell’ Arte group of figurines, is awarded annually as a trophy to winners of the International Book Award. In the spring of 2010, Lagerfeld turned his attention to another classic from the manufacturer’s historical repertoire of figures: Clara, the well-known rhinoceros, was given an African mask as a makeover.

Gustavo Lins, Dottore, 2008. Figure by Franz Anton Bustelli, 1759/60. Couture edition, limited edition of 25.

Born in Belo Horizonte in 1961, Gustavo Lins initially studied architecture in Minais Gerais and Barcelona. But one of his professors noticed that his passion was rather directed elsewhere and told him “to reconsider what materials he’d rather be working with – glass and steel or linen and silk.” His answer was to move to Paris in the early 1990s to complete his studies. In the meantime he learned his craft in the fashion world as an assistant, among others to two great eccentrics of the Paris couture scene, John Galliano and Jean Paul Gaultier. What he was fascinated by most was “the structure of shaped ‘clothes’ [wrapped] around the bodies.” His approach to designing clothes was strictly architectural, proceeding from two-dimensional sketches to volume. “At a distance, it is an object. Once worn, it becomes a space. I construct it, but it is the person with her mind and intelligence and personality who occupies it.”

Pascal Millet, Leda, 2008. Figure by Franz Anton Bustelli, 1759/60. Couture edition, limited edition of 25.

When Pascal Millet took over as artistic director of Carven in 2001, he was joining one of the pioneers of French haute couture. Founded by Carmen de Tommaso in Paris in 1945, Carven had a youthful chic that heralded the dawn of the palmy days of the economic miracle. Today Carven is still a brand with a global reputation, selling fashions, accessories, perfumes and furniture, while its haute couture range has a small but devoted international clientele. Millet succeeded in regenerating the long estab­lished salon stylistically as well. His haute couture collections, which have featured opulent fur jackets, cashmere coats and richly decorated dresses, bear witness to luxury, an eye for detail and an exuberance of ideas, displaying a new self-confidence along with an appropriate nod in the direction of the founder.

Angela Missoni, Corine, 2003. Figurine by Franz Anton Bustelli, 1759/60.

“I always have to be doing something, especially with my hands: making changes, moving things, reorganising them, improving them,” confesses Angela Missoni, who was born in Milan in 1958. The dedicated all-rounder was like a new lease of life for her parents’ designer knitwear label that rose to fame in the sixties with its distinctive zigzag pattern.

She hired famous photographers such as Mario Testino for her campaigns and starting in 1997, as manager and chief designer, she systematically expanded the Missoni product line. She contracted licences for furniture, home accessories and tableware that won numerous accolades as a home collection. She was the driving force behind a children’s collection as well as a line of eyewear and, in 2009 in Edinburgh, Scotland, opened at her own initiative, the first of a planned total of 30 Missoni hotels.