HERitage San Leucio Opens in Caserta, Pairing Stefano Chiassai's Designs with Antonio Biasiucci's ID Photographs

Founded by Giuseppe Menniti and creatively directed by Stefano Chiassai, the fashion house HERitage San Leucio was inaugurated on 16 October inside the Real Sito di San Leucio, the hillside silk-working settlement above Caserta founded by the Bourbons in the eighteenth century. The Opificio Menniti has been turned into an immersive, synesthetic itinerary. Chiassai's collection grew from a photograph he took of petunias in bloom during a walk through the Belvedere; that floral motif now overlays the geometry of the Bourbon arcades and the lightness of silk. The exhibition includes a room of fichu — the triangular veil worn by eighteenth-century women, an ancestor of the scarf — suspended in space alongside tapestries, sculptures and womenswear. Tall, slender mannequins clad in sculptural drapes or relief-woven petunias stand through the installation. Antonio Biasiucci, a native of nearby Dragoni, contributes his ID cycle: black-and-white images in which looms rise like mechanical cathedrals, Jacquard punch cards become lit cityscapes and the faces of the silk workers read as maps of dignity. The title ID carries three meanings — collective identity, the Freudian id and the digital identifier. Live tailoring, embroidery and cutting will take place in the manufacturing section, where a 1970s drawing by the priest-artist Battista Marello, who spent 50 years reviving the colony's utopia, is also on view.