"Bellezza" magazine

Realized works

Bellezza was the Italian fashion magazine to which Ponti contributed from 1941 to 1943, fighting for art in its pages as well. He saw couture and fashion as forms of art. And when, in Bellezza as in Stile, Gio Ponti addressed himself to women You, O women, he did it on behalf of art. From his women -even when he drew them, in the manner of Campigli, as women/angels- he asked a great deal. He wanted them to be the creators of their own homes, free from unfavourable preconceptions. Women who would teach him the living house even though in reality the houses he dedicated to them were already designed in all their details. Women who loved books, books they would scatter all over the house. Women for whom the house was a place to stay -stanza, the beautiful Italian word for room, derives from stare, to stay. Women who liked to be given works of art for the house a noble expenditure, works by Scipione, Severini, Sironi, Martini (a genius), Carrà, Tosi, and De Pisis. Women who ought to buy the just published Apocalisse illustrated by de Chirico, and read the just published Anthology of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture is part of everybody's life. But why did these women have Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Life, and Plaisir de France in their rooms, and not Longanesi's L'ltaliano, Maccari's II Selvaggio, and Omnibus, Gio Ponti laid siege to the impregnable fortress of snobbery, and almost won. He grasped the identical nature of house and clothing as for his clothing, the clothing he designed in these years, it was a sort of colored costume, like a ceramic object, in which the body was splendidly concealed. He did not like fashion as fashion, that is, where it meant slavery to the fashionable and not a real change in habits he would love Mary Quant. For him, where fashion could not be art, then the only surviving elegance was personal dignity.