Gianfranco Ferré
within the lens

The exhibition Gianfranco Ferré within the lens is designed to showcase Gianfranco Ferré's work through photographs, black-and-white and colour prints, slides, print proofs, and is enriched with clothing, sketches, and drawings.

The central focus of the narrative is the photographic section of the Gianfranco Ferré Historical Archive: over 90 works, never before exhibited, by eight masters of fashion photography who worked with Ferré on iconic advertising campaigns: Gian Paolo Barbieri, Guy Bourdin, Michel Comte, Patrick Demarchelier, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Bettina Rheims and Herb Ritts.

The six rooms accompanying the photo gallery are inspired by the metaphor of the darkroom and illustrate the image production process through print proofs, photocolours, slides and shots annotated by the photographers. At the same time, they reveal the designer's creative process by introducing six operating principles that he often evoked – composing, reducing, emphasising, recalibrating, deconstructing, exciting – which link the photographic language to Ferré's work, combining the images with other central elements of design such as drawings, material folders and the clothes themselves.

The exhibition thus creates continuous references that allow the designer's work to be interpreted through the characteristic traits of the various photographers: from Barbieri's compositional rigour to Comte's quick and essential shots; from Lindbergh's chiaroscuro stories to the intensity of Rheims' portraits; from Bourdin's eccentric shots to Demarchelier's refined naturalness; from Ritts' graphic classicism to the complexity of Meisel, who is able to filter a sharp gaze on contemporary life through the glossy reality of fashion.

Through a multidisciplinary and non-chronological approach and explorations of virtual and augmented reality developed within the Research Center, the exhibition aims to provide a comprehensive overview of Gianfranco Ferré's work.