Rosa Genoni

Ball gown by Rosa Genoni

Rosa Genoni (* 1867 in Tirano , † 1954 in Varese ) was an Italian fashion designer , feminist and pacifist .

Life

Rosa Genoni came from a family with 18 children living in the Italian city of Tirano in Valtellina . As the oldest of the siblings, she had to leave school at the age of ten in order to contribute to the family's livelihood. She began her apprenticeship in the tailoring studio of a relative of the family in Milan , which she completed in 1885 with a master's degree.

In Milan she made contact with socialist -minded working groups. In 1884 she was sent to Paris by the Labor Party of Italy ( Partito Operaio Italiano ), which had only been founded two years earlier in Milan . There she continued to work as a tailor and came into contact with the new French fashion world .

Back in Milan, she made a career as a tailor in the fashion house H. Haardt et fils; she processed the technical and fashionable suggestions from France in an independent way and made a contribution to the development of Italian fashion in Milan. At the 1906 World Exhibition in Milan, she won a Grand Prize for two dresses she had created. From 1905 she taught at the vocational school for girls in Milan.

As an activist, Rosa Genoni campaigned for a better position for women workers and, with a view to their own youth, for a better education for girls. She took part in the first congress held in Rome in 1906 by the Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane . As early as 1893 she had traveled as an Italian delegate to the International Socialist Congress in Zurich, and she also represented the Italian women's association at the 1915 International Women's Peace Congress in The Hague .

The surveillance by the Italian security forces in the early days of fascism in Italy later made Genoni's further political activity difficult and she withdrew from the public. She was a supporter of the anthroposophy founded by Rudolf Steiner .

The grave of Rosa Genoni is in the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan.

literature

• Eugenia Paulicelli: Rosa Genoni. La Moda is a cosa seria. Milano Expo 1906 e la Grande Guerra. 2015.
• Eugenia Paulicelli: Fashion under Fascism. Beyond the Black Shirt. New York 2004.
• Daniela Rossini: Feminism and Nationalism. The National Council of Italian Women, the World War, and the Rise of Fascism, 1911-1922. In: Journal of Women's History, 26, 2014, pp. 6-58.