Critic’s Notebook: Pucci was a dawg

• Braniff Airways Collection, History of Aviation Collection, Special Collections Department, Eugene McDermott Library, The University of Texas at Dallas.
• HOW ‘BOUT THEM DAWGS?: Jet-setting designer Emilio Pucci’s vivid prints were beloved by ’60s icons like Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Sophia Loren and Jacqueline Susann. A stylish new exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens brings to light a little-known fact about Pucci: He was once a student at UGA.

Italian designer Emilio Pucci is closely associated with a certain ’60s jet-setting, “Mad Men”-style glamor: Jackie Kennedy loved his work, Marilyn Monroe was even buried in a silk jersey dress of his design and Beyoncé worked the old Pucci mystique when she wore a boatnecked black gown from the house of Pucci at Obama’s inauguration.. But what’s less well-known about the designer was the fact that as a young student, Pucci attended the University of Georgia and he maintained connections to the institution and the state throughout his life. You see, Pucci was a dawg.

A stylish new exhibition currently at UGA’s Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Emilio Pucci in America, examines the life and work of the famed Italian designer with particular emphasis on his American and Georgia connections. It features about 20 full designs on mannequins plus various other objects associated with the designer and his time in the US.

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• Special Collections, Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library, Reed College.
• SNOW JOB: After leaving UGA, Pucci hitchhiked across the country so he could ski on the slopes of Oregon. He was eventually awarded a scholarship to Reed College where he formed the ski team and also designed their uniforms, which were among his earliest designs.

Curator Mary Koon recounts the story of Pucci’s time at UGA in the exhibition brochure. Pucci was born in Naples in 1914 into an aristocratic family dating back to 13th-century Florence (Botticelli, da Vinci and Ghirlandaio were among the Renaissance masters who depicted Pucci’s ancestors in portraits and frescoes). The young Pucci grew up with few cares other than perfecting his moves on the ski slopes and tennis courts of Italy (His home address was the Pucci Palace in Florence, built for his family nearly 1,000 years before he was born). He was an adventurous young man, and after two years studying agriculture at the University of Milan, he traveled to the United States to attend the cutting-edge agricultural school at UGA (Koon points out that his family likely hoped the knowledge he gained there could be applied to the family’s agri-business interests in Tuscany).

During his time at UGA, he was actively involved in student life: He formed a one-man UGA ski team, and he joined the university’s renowned chapter of the Demosthenian Literary Society. Koon even recounts how Pucci publicly debated classmate Herman Talmadge (later governor of Georgia and U.S. Senator) in the university chapel. The urgently pressing topic of debate? The virtues of the Southern belle versus the modern Italian woman.

Though Pucci apparently fit in well with other students, what he seemed to have learned at UGA was that he wasn’t cut out for agriculture. After a year of study, in the summer of 1936, he hitchhiked across the US, making his way to Oregon where he pursued an interest closer to his heart: skiing. He eventually formed and coached the ski team at Oregon’s Reed College where he was awarded a scholarship and even designed the team’s uniform, one of his first major design projects and also his introduction to the process of modern industrial clothing manufacture.

Pucci returned to Italy in 1937, enlisting and fighting in the Italian airforce during World War II. After the war, through a strangely circuitous and serendipitous series of events, Pucci received his first design commission: fashion photographer Toni Frissell took some pictures of the designer in his self-designed skiwear on the slopes of Zermatt, Switzerland, and later showed them to Harper’s Bazaar editor and fashion maven Diana Vreeland, who asked Pucci to design a line of ski clothes in the United States. The rest, as they say, is history. Pucci was a hit, one of the first Italian designers to sell in America after the war, and he was one of the crucial early designers who helped make Italian design into what we know of today as, well, Italian design. He opened his first boutique in Capri in 1949, where he was well-placed to make and sell his work, including his “Capri” pants, to the burgeoning post-war consumer jet-set and Dolce Vita fun-seekers. He was one of the first designers, along with Pierre Cardin, to attach his name to a line of products that included perfumes, shoes and eyeglasses.

• Braniff Airways Collection, History of Aviation Collection, Special Collections Department, Eugene McDermott Library, The University of Texas at Dallas.
• PRINCE OF PRINTS: Pucci designed a futuristic, glamorous look for the stewardesses of Braniff Airlines in the mid-1960s. The exhibition at UGA’s Georgia Museum of Art features several of his designs for the company.

Pucci revisited Georgia throughout his hugely successful career. He visited in 1953 to participate with other American and European fashion designers in a charity fashion show in Tallulah Falls organized by the Young Matron’s Circle of Tallulah Falls School. In 1977, he was inducted into the Demosthenian Wall of Fame on the campus of UGA and returned for the ceremony where he was a keynote speaker (every woman in attendance got a Pucci scarf!). Pucci’s American headquarters were in Atlanta in the 1980s, and in June 1985 he premiered his resort collection at the Atlanta Apparel Mart, following it up with a trip to Athens to speak to students at UGA. He died in 1992.

The fun, colorful exhibition focuses mostly on the American connections but also touches on various aspects of his entire career. Special attention is given to some of Pucci’s most famous American work: his futuristic, eye-popping designs for the stewardesses of Braniff Airlines in the mid 1960s (the designs also ended up on a series of Barbie dolls, also on display), his fabric designs for the Rose Marie Reid swimsuit label and his design for the Apollo 15 astronauts’ insignia.

One of the strongest impressions that a visitor is likely to take away from the exhibition is that, in both his work and his life, there always remained a touch of something American about this most Italian designer. Although he projected the image of the flawlessly elegant aristocratic European playboy, Pucci seems to have maintained a seeking, easy-going, enterprising and forward-looking attitude throughout his later life. “Money is not the goal,” he told an interviewer from Time magazine in the 1960s. “If you do something good, it falls into your lap.”