The White Shirt According to Me.
Gianfranco Ferré

A constant presence running like a red thread throughout Gianfranco Ferré’s career, the white shirt was described by the designer himself as “a sign of my style” or “the contemporary lexicon of elegance”. The White Shirt According to Me. Gianfranco Ferré is conceived to illuminate the designer’s sartorial and creative poetics through an exploration of the white shirt, highlighting its most innovative design elements and its infinite, captivating interpretations.

The exhibition opens with a suspended installation of panels onto which large-scale reproductions of Ferré’s original drawings are projected – perfect flashes that outline his creative vision and serve as the key to accessing the world contained within each project. In the first section, the construction principles and innovative structural elements of the shirt emerge through striking photographic macro-installations by Leonardo Salvini, which simulate X-rays. These offer both a technical and poetic reading of a selection of garments, revealing the formal and material framework of each shirt while emphasising textures and layers.

The heart of the exhibition lies at the centre of the large main gallery, where twenty-seven white shirts – an intimate army of sartorial masterpieces – silently bear witness to twenty years of creative and conceptual brilliance. Displayed in chronological order, the shirts appear as sculptural forms bathed in lighting designed to make the whites glow in varying shades, while shadows provide a subtle counterpoint, producing a compelling sense of three-dimensionality. Along the sides of the large exhibition hall are technical drawings, runway sketches, photographs by renowned masters, and advertising and editorial images from the Gianfranco Ferré Foundation Archive.

In the following year, the exhibition will be rethought for the spaces of Palazzo Reale in Milan, and then at the Phoenix Art Museum in the USA.