Notebook and pencil. That is to say: the essentials to carry in your handbag at all times, even when it comes to jotting down in a quick sketch the style of the outgoing female students of a Milanese high school, because fashion (life) is not only done on the catwalks, but also (and especially) off them. She is Brunetta Moretti Mateldi (1904-1988), for everyone Brunetta. Designer, painter, stylist, costume designer, journalist who marked the history of fashion and costume of the 20th century. Born in Ivrea, class of 1904, zodiac sign Virgo. All the precision and productivity of the Piedmontese, all the creative flair that can be inherited from a father who, though an army officer, is instinctively a musician and from a mother who, in her youth, was an art model. Brunetta grows up here and makes her own everything she needs to become the ironic, tireless, prolific, experimental, straightforward, sincere woman who will traverse the history of a century. An omnivorous reader, a finch appetite, Milanese by adoption from the 1920s onward, Brunetta began at a very young age the series of prestigious collaborations that would follow one another season after season: La Domenica del Corriere, Il Corriere dell'Informazione, Lidel, Il Dramma, La Lettura, la Scena Illustrata, l'Illustrazione Italiana, Amica, Grazia, Bellezza, Novità until she reached Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. But her traces remain not only in newspapers and magazines, but also among the pages of children's books and newspapers (such as the Corriere dei Piccoli, among whose pioneers was the man who became her husband, the artist Filiberto Mateldi) and again on advertising posters and in collaborations with the most famous fashion houses. As well as in the friendship with Mariuccia Gallia, whose confidante and intimate collaborator Brunetta becomes. For her he made drawings and portraits but, above all, he invented the ingenious logo in which, from an elegant box, peeps out a refined woman who, of the striped lid with bow, made her enviable headgear: the most sought-after, the one found only in Gallia e Peter's boutique, at the time at No. 3 Via Monte Napoleone. The traits of Brunetta's designs go beyond dresses and hats. Clothes and accessories for Brunetta are the most powerful and effective means of telling the story of women and their change between eras, even with flaws and inaccuracies, even with ironies and caricatures. As if to say that by humanizing her silhouettes, humanizing women and overcoming boring stereotypes, Brunetta deifies women, makes them icons. Even more so thanks to his collaboration with his lifelong friend, Camilla Cederna, with whom for many years he edited the column Il lato debole (The Weak Side) for L'Espresso, dedicated precisely to "fashions and manners, tics, fizzes, customs, neuroses of the moment." At the tip of the chair, as she used to sit, she who of the history of costume knew everything (whether we were talking about peplums of ancient Greece, odalisque veils, seventeenth-century lace or recent worldliness) was the designer who was able to capture and tell the ironic and fresh side of fashion: the most serious of all.
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