A new exhibition at Palazzo Medici Riccardi is giving Florence back two of its most restless sons. Firenze Déco: Atmosfere degli anni Venti, running until August 25 at Palazzo Medici Riccardi, reconstructs the decade in which the city positioned itself as a laboratory of international modernism and features two brothers who both signed their work with futuristic wordplay: THAYAHT, a bifrontal palindrome, and RAM, his younger brother Ruggero. The symmetry of their names, it turns out, was the most orderly thing about them.
Ernesto Michahelles (THAYAHT) was born in Florence in 1893 with Ruggero (RAM) following five years later. They grew up in the Poggio Imperiale villa that had once been home and studio to their great-grandfather, the American neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers, in a cosmopolitan household of Anglo-Swiss-American lineage. Both trained under the same teachers, sneaking into the studio of the painter Filippo Marfori Savini, and later the American Julius Rolshoven.
Their most iconic collaboration began in the summer of 1919, when Ernesto started sketching a revolutionary garment, publishing the results the following June not in a high-fashion magazine but on the pulpy pages of La Nazione. The result was a T-shaped one-piece in cheap cotton or hemp, cut from a single rectangle of fabric, assembled with seven buttons and a belt, not a thread wasted. Ernesto called it the Tuta, dropping one letter from the Italian tutta, “everything,” so that the missing consonant reappeared in the T-shape of the design. RAM designed the illustrated models showing the Tuta as worn and his training as a chemical-colorist at the Istituto di Chimica Tintoria in Prato informed the choice of fabrics.
More than a garment, the Tuta was a manifesto in cloth, emerging from the radical climate of Futurism and the material constraints of post-World War I Italy. Conceived as cheap, functional and reproducible, it rejected bourgeois elegance in favour of a universal, modern uniform suited to accelerated life. The published pattern included full cutting instructions, so that anyone who could sew could make one at home, an early gesture toward DIY fashion, while anticipating modern workwear trends. One-piece workwear already existed, but the Tuta was radical in proposing such a form for everyday civilian life, unisex and accessible, a total outfit for a total society.
Images courtesy of Uffizi Galleries
THAYAHT proclaimed it “the most innovative, futuristic garment ever produced in the history of Italian fashion”, and within weeks, over a thousand Florentines had made one. Ten days after publication, he organized what may be the first flash mob in history: a gathering at piazzale Michelangelo where nobles and workers, professors and students marched together, all wearing the Tuta. And then Countess Rucellai organized a tribute dance at her palace at which wearing it was compulsory: the anti-bourgeois uniform had become a bourgeois fashion statement. The word tuta entrenched itself into the Italian lexicon, becoming the word for tracksuit; radical form becomes style, and style becomes habit.
The Tuta was conceived while Ernesto was working in Paris for Madeleine Vionnet, the couturière credited with introducing the bias cut to Parisian fashion. He designed her logo and illustrated her gowns in a style that traced the movement of body and fabric through space with Futurist lines. Ruggero, meanwhile, was building a career as an illustrator. Together they won the National Competition for the new staging of Aida in 1924. Scholars have since placed both brothers’ work firmly within Art Deco rather than Futurism, noting they only formally joined the Futurist movement in 1929, a full decade after the Tuta. The subtitle of the 2005 MART retrospective said it plainly: Futurista irregolare. Irregular Futurists, with the geometry and restlessness of the movement without quite fitting to its ideology. Until in 1929, introduced by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the father of Futurism, Ernesto met Benito Mussolini and gifted him a steel-iron sculptural portrait: Dux con pietra miliare, a rationalized metallic head on a stone pedestal. Both brothers officially joined the Futurist movement that year, and by 1939 Ernesto had painted Il grande nocchiere, a vast automaton-helmsman, Mussolini barely disguised, guiding Italy toward war. The work now sits in the Wolfsoniana collection in Genoa under the heading “Fascism and Propaganda.” There is a complicating footnote: the brothers’ Swiss citizenship meant they sometimes exhibited as “foreigners”, insiders by Marinetti dispensation rather than by birthright.
After the war, their trajectories diverged: RAM remained anchored in painting and illustration, while THAYAHT moved toward cosmic speculation. In 1954, he founded C.I.R.N.O.S. — the Centro Indipendente Ricerche Notizie Osservazioni Spaziali. He developed theories: the “psi effect”, a telepathic connection between UFO and observer, and the “sigma effect”, electromagnetic interference on circuits and compasses. He died in 1959. Ruggero outlived him by 17 years, dying in 1976, the quieter half of the pair and the one history has been slower to find.
Firenze Déco gives both brothers back to the city that made them: the fabric shop in via Orsanmichele, the avant-garde bookshop of Gonnelli, the pages of La Nazione. Framed within Art Deco elegance, they sit comfortably enough, but the full picture is rougher: the anti-bourgeois garment applauded by the aristocracy; the democratic artists who found themselves inside the machinery of Fascist spectacle; and a modernism that never resolved its contradictions.
