Lyle Roblin: The Italian Look
Photography: Nick Clements
After WWII much in Europe was destroyed and Italy was no different. However, Rome’s film industry had survived and out of the ruins of the Eternal City came a group of directors who adapted and modified conventional film production techniques and in doing so created a new genre in filmmaking: neorealism. This is a style that was born out necessity rather than planning as it used what could be found on the streets and in the bars. Street casting and shooting at rough and ready locations without set-dressing was the trademark of the main protagonists of this genre. Although Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) was considered the first of its kind, it was Di Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1952) that showed how by reflecting real-life in film the storytelling process could be made more dramatic. By the mid-1960s neorealism had developed from social commentary to a political discourse and the new players like Pasolini and Antonioni acted as self appointed spokesmen for a burgeoning class of Italian bourgeois Bohemians with a Marxist agenda. In Fellini’s 1963 film 8 ½ a troubled director attempts to cure a creative-block by living a series of sensual and psychological experiences in the hope for inspiration. We can only speculate that the angst depicted in that film was partly a satire on these earnest young men in the third waved of neorealism.
In this photo-story Men’s File partners with photographer and specialist in Italian tailoring Lyle Roblin. Given the theme of the ‘Auteur’ – meaning a film director who assumes the complete role of creator of a film as a work of art – by Men’s File he set about styling himself in the role. The Canadian selected an early 1960s inspired American-look suit with an Italian cut from
Connection Knitwear and glasses from the London based Kirk Originals. His shirt is bespoke from a Neapolitan shirt-maker. His shoes are original, probably early 1970s and the hat is by Stetson of a slightly earlier period (similar models are still available today from the hat makers).
A resident of Milan he has spent the past decade on an in depth research project into the world’s most renowned town for the manufacture of fine woolen suiting textiles. Set in a mountain region about 80kms northeast of Turin, Biella has been recognized as having the perfect environmental characteristics for textile production for over 1000 years. Due to cheaper imports the demand for the high-level fabrics from this region has dropped and many mills are now closed, the buildings demolished and the land redeveloped. Realising that history was being bulldozed, Mr Roblin started to record the empty buildings where millions of meters of super 100s and 120s had been woven. This act of photographic archeology culminated in an exhibition and book entitled Metamorfosi (2008). His latest work can be seen in The Italian Gentleman by Hugo Jacomet (from Thames & Hudson, 2017). An odyssey around the artisan’s workshops and sartorial ateliers of Italy, Lyle Roblin provided all the photography for that tome in his own inimitable style. @lyleroblin
connectionknitwear.com
kirkoriginals.com
stetson.eu
–
