PIROVANO - VINTAGE MILANESE

BOURGEOIS FASHION IN 1960s MILAN

 Pirovano represents "bourgeois fashion", with its values of decorum, good taste, decency. With its beautiful handcrafted bags and incredible embroidered clothes in warm tones and with a vaguely Renaissance feel, the brand contributed to the creation of the style of the Milanese woman, which found its first definitions in the Sixties.

Well concealed under a veil of modesty, Pirovano also embodies the new social semantics of the post-war period, when individuality began to find space and women, after years of doing the work of men engaged at the battle front, started claiming a social position also outside the home.

THE PIROVANO TAILOR SHOP AND VIA MONTENAPOLEONE

A few years before the Second World War, Emma Maria Bonfanti, after some small but fortunate commercial experiences in the clothing field, with the help of her sisters Iride and Anita, started to turn the outcomes of her intelligent creativity into patterns.

In spite of the difficulties caused by the outbreak of the war, her tailoring creations, associated with those of her husband Felice Pirovano, a well-known leatherworker, became immediately famous. More than 100 people worked in the laboratories.The leather goods stores in via Montenapoleone n.1 and the tailor's store at n. 8 were regularly visited by the best and most demanding Milanese clientele, as well as being mentioned by actress Franca Valeri in a famous monologue 

MADE TO MEASURE LUXURY

Those were the years in which Paris was still the undisputed capital of fashion although Italy was beginning to fight for the throne, mostly thanks to tailors such as Pirovano who created a refined, "made to measure" luxury - less blatant than the Parisian one and more aligned with the still very much conservative values that dominated the peninsula. 

Today Pirovano is fondly remembered as a fundamental chapter in Milan's history. The Pirovano bags, perfectly preserved and with a timeless design, are sought after by collectors and vintage lovers, while the clothes, strictly below the knee, become almost radical in these years of ostentation.