Heritage Landscapes vol.24

Barry Blitt is a famous cartoonist and illustrator, also a Pulitzer winner in the Editorial Cartoon category, who has created more than a hundred covers for The New Yorker. Also for The New Yorker, director Nicolas Heller visited him at his home studio and interviewed him. An opportunity to talk about his archive and his 30-year work for one of the world's most famous magazines.

It begins with a change of clothes, and continues with Blitt's recounting of his career. Although, from time to time, he pauses from the very boredom of telling about himself. It is a wry, funny, intelligent interview, where one senses everywhere the light and deep talent of its protagonist. Sketches, watercolors, passive aggressive humor, bookshelves, listlessness, big ideas.

From his first drawings as a child, art school, life in Toronto, moving to New York and beginning his career with comics and illustration. It was here, in New York, that almost without realizing it he began to do political cartoons. Until his first New Yorker cover, published on January 10, 1994, where a lot of people smoke out of windows and on the ledges of New York buildings. From there would come more than a hundred more covers, Putin-submarines, the Statue of Liberty walking on a wire between two buildings, and many more. Extremely funny, slightly provocative, sarcastic cartoons. Between a laugh, a brush stroke, and some blues.

On its website, Olivetti collects several pieces of its history such as that of the store on Rue de Faubourg St. Honoré in Paris, which between the 1950s and 1970s was a manifesto of Italian style. Designed by Franco Albini and then reinterpreted by Gae Aulenti, the space became a showcase of Olivetti design and culture. Albini focused on walls covered in green fabrics, Venini chandeliers and modular shelves. Aulenti in 1967 redesigned the store as a “piazza d'Italia,” with display tiers, a central red pillar and an African tribal sculpture as a symbol of Man and modernity. The store, celebrated by the international press, became a landmark not only for technological innovation, but also for cultural events, with art and design exhibitions.

Through March 23, 2025, the National Museum of Art and Design in Oslo is hosting the exhibition Ephemeral Matters: Into the Fashion Archive, curated by Marco Pecorari (Deputy Editor of our ARCHIVIO N° 9) and realized with the support of various collectors. The exhibition focuses on ephemeral objects: not clothes, as one would think, but letters, documents, invitations, fabric samples and other objects-often kept in the background-that nonetheless testify to fashion and its history, and here treated as aesthetic objects. More than 500 documents and objects from fashion houses such as Dior, Balenciaga, and designers such as Patrick Kelly and Jean Charles de Castelbajac appear.

At 18 Place Vendôme is the Chanel Joaillerie boutique, which has been open since 1997. It is there that the archives of Chanel's Patrimoine Horlogerie-Joaillerie are located. From 1932 to the present, the collection contains 800 pieces. Since the first Haute Joaillerie Couture collection, Bijoux de Diamants, in '32, Gabrielle Chanel built a language in jewelry, making sure that each piece was able to tell a story. She worked with Paul Iribe, Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard, and Robert Bresson to shape the narrative of her diamond bijoux. Here's how Vogue gives us a peek into the Maison's archives.

Credits: Barry Blitt, The New Yorker; Olivetti; Museo Nazionale di Arte e Design di Oslo; Vogue Italia, Chanel

On September 18, in Piazza Tre Torri in Citylife, Milan, there was the opening of the exhibition PROSPECTIVE Archives. Italian Fashion in Archival Photography realized by the Historical Archives of Fondazione Fiera Milano in collaboration with SmartCityLife and the Promemoria Group team.

10 large thematic islands told a century of history through the images of renowned photographers Franco Bottino and Giovanni Gastel and the Historical Archives of Fondazione Fiera Milano. The photographs, selected from more than 30 thousand images that can be consulted online at prospettivarchivi.it, recount the clothes, accessories, colors, and fashions that from 1946 to the early 2000s became synonymous with Italian culture.